We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.

Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.

We spend our lives on a thin slice between the unimaginably small scales of the atoms that compose us and the infinitely large scales of galaxies.

Modern neuroimaging is like asking an astronaut in the space shuttle to look out the window and judge how America is doing.

Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.

If choices and decisions derive from hidden mental processes, then free choice is either an illusion or, at minimum, more tightly constrained than previously considered.

This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.