You are part of a complex social network that changes your biology with every interaction, and which your actions can change.

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

Reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum.

It is more parsimonious to assume that the sun goes around the Earth, that atoms at the smallest scale operate in accordance with the same rules that objects at larger scales follow, and that we perceive what is really out there. All of these positions were long defended by argument from parsimony, and they were all wrong.

The deep secret of the brain is that not only the spinal cord but the entire central nervous system works this way: internally generated activity is modulated by sensory input. In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception.

Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.

Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.