One of the most impressive features of brains - and especially human brains - is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way.

In my view, the argument from parsimony is really no argument at all - it typically functions only to shut down more interesting discussion. If history is any guide, it's never a good idea to assume that a scientific problem is cornered.

You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

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

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

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.

Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don't stop.