p. 21 "The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing." - Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
p. 56 At least with the future we can wait and see what the outcome of chaotic equations produces. But trying to work backward and understand what state our planet was in to produce the present is equally if not more challenging. The past, even more than the future, is probably something we can never truly know.
p. 75 "Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." - Arthur Schopenhauer
p. 172 The problem, [Herbert McCabe] believed, is that religion far too often commits idolatry by trying to engage too personally with this concept of God. The trouble is that an undefined, unknowable, transcendent concept is too abstract for many to engage with. It can't offer the sort of consolation that many seek. So perhaps it is inevitable that God's potency depends on becoming a little less transcendent, and more tangible.
p. 229 "The universe is not constructed for our convenience. It's not an exercise in the philosophy of science. It's too bad if we can't find these things out. In fact, I'd be very suspicious if all these fundamental questions happened to be answerable by what we're doing.
p. 318 Consciousness allows the brain to take part in mental time travel. You can think of yourself in the past and even project yourself into the future. But at the same time, being aware of your own existence means having to confront the inevitability of your demise. Death-awareness is the price we pay for self-awareness. That is why Gallup believes that later in life chimpanzees prefer to lose their ability to be conscious of themselves. Could dementia in humans play a similar role, protecting aging humans from the painful recognition of their impending death?
p. 331 Many neuroscientists now speak of consciousness as being similar to the wetness of water. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon in the sense that it is a higher-level property of a system triggered by neuronal activity happening at a lower level. But that doesn't really explain what this higher-level thing really is.
p. 333 "What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind." - The Dhammapada
p. 417 I wonder, though, whether, as I come to the end of my exploration, I have changed my mind about declaring myself an atheist. With my definition of a God as that which we cannot know, to declare myself an atheist would mean that I believe there is nothing we cannot know. I don't believe that anymore. In some sense I think I have proved that this God does exist. The challenge now is to explore what quality this God has. My statement about being an atheist is really just a response to the rather impoverished version of God offered by most religions and cultures. I reject the existence of a supernatural intelligence that intervenes in the evolution of the universe and in our lives. This is a rejection of the God that people assign strange properties to - such as compassion, wisdom, love - that make no sense when it comes to the idea that I am exploring.
p. 426 Studies into consciousness suggest boundaries beyond which we cannot go. Our internal worlds are potentially unknowable to others. But isn't that one of the reasons we write and read novels? It is the most effective way to give others access to that internal world.-
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