It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us.

If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy.

Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological coctails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.

I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to...ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now.

If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn't be smart enough to understand them.

Keep in mind that every single generation before us has worked under the assumption that they possessed all the major tools for understanding the universe, and they were all wrong, without exception.

All life will die, all mind will cease, and it will all be as if it had never happened. That, to be honest, is the goal to which evolution is traveling, that is the "benevolent" end of the furious living and furious dying.