There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

YES we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots

The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.

What you can imagine depends on what you know.

Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! ... Not a single one of your ancestors, all the way back to the bacteria, succumbed to predation before reproducing, or lost out in the competition for a mate.

If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion, particles jostling on the one side, and the world of meaning and purpose, design on the other.

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.