My Clippings (old Kindle).txt

Scott Adams - God's Debris 
- Highlight on Page 44 | Added on Wednesday, July 27, 2011, 05:45 PM

“You can’t judge the value of a thing by looking only at costs. In many countries, more people die from hospital errors than religious wars, but no one accuses hospitals of being evil. Religious people are happier, they live longer, have fewer accidents, and stay out of trouble compared to nonreligious people. From society’s viewpoint, religion works.” 32
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Scott Adams - God's Debris 
- Highlight on Page 54 | Added on Thursday, July 28, 2011, 09:07 AM

“I can conceive of only one challenge for an omnipotent being—the challenge of destroying himself.” “You think God would want to commit suicide?” I asked. “I’m not saying he wants anything. I’m saying it’s the only challenge.” “I think God would prefer to exist than to not exist.”
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Scott Adams - God's Debris 
- Highlight on Page 85 | Added on Thursday, July 28, 2011, 10:36 PM

“Skeptics,” he said, “suffer from the skeptics’ disease— the problem of being right too often.”
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Scott Adams - God's Debris 
- Highlight on Page 119 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2011, 06:10 PM

“People think they follow advice but they don’t. Humans are only capable of receiving information. They create their own advice. If you seek to influence someone, don’t waste time giving advice. You can change only what people know, not what they do.”
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Scott Adams - God's Debris 
- Highlight on Page 119 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2011, 06:14 PM

“Yes, that is the essence of being human. Any person you meet at a party will be interested in his own life above all other topics. Your awkward silences can be solved by asking simple questions about the person’s life.”
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Scott Adams - God's Debris 
- Highlight on Page 126 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2011, 06:31 PM

For the next few hours the old man revealed more of his ingredients for successful social living. Express gratitude. Give more than is expected. Speak optimistically. Touch people. Remember names. Don’t confuse flexibility with weakness. Don’t judge people by their mistakes; rather, judge them by how they respond to their mistakes. Remember that your physical appearance is for the benefit of others. Attend to your own basic needs first; otherwise you will not be useful to anyone else
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Scott Adams - God's Debris 
- Highlight on Page 130 | Added on Saturday, July 30, 2011, 06:37 PM

When you consider all of the coincidences that are possible, it is not surprising that you experience a few every day.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 145-47  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 12:28 PM

Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures—and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 152-54  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 12:31 PM

Religious thinkers in all faiths, and on both ends of the political spectrum, are united on precisely this point; the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence for His existence, but that faith in Him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 159-61  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 12:33 PM

A science of human flourishing may seem a long way off, but to achieve it, we must first acknowledge that the intellectual terrain actually exists.9
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 195-96  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 12:41 PM

While it would be unethical to deprive young children of normal care for the purposes of experiment, society inadvertently performs such experiments every day.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 208-10  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 12:47 PM

As with all matters of fact, differences of opinion on moral questions merely reveal the incompleteness of our knowledge; they do not oblige us to respect a diversity of views indefinitely. Facts and Values
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 208-10  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 12:47 PM

As with all matters of fact, differences of opinion on moral questions merely reveal the incompleteness of our knowledge; they do not oblige us to respect a diversity of views indefinitely.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 238-39  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 12:54 PM

the concept of well-being is like the concept of physical health: it resists precise definition, and yet it is indispensable.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Bookmark on Page 20 | Loc. 386  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 02:55 PM


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The New Oxford American Dictionary 
- Highlight Loc. 830681  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 02:57 PM

pyre.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 21 | Loc. 406-7  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 03:04 PM

Is it possible that certain people are incapable of wanting what they should want? Of course—just as there will always be people who are unable to grasp specific facts or believe certain true propositions.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 423-24  | Added on Sunday, September 04, 2011, 03:13 PM

Anyone who wants to understand the world should be open to new facts and new arguments, even on subjects where his or her views are very well established.
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JavaScript: The Good Parts (Douglas Crockford)
- Highlight Loc. 526-28  | Added on Friday, November 04, 2011, 11:26 PM

It is usually necessary to test object.hasOwnProperty(variable) to determine whether the property name is truly a member of the object or was found instead on the prototype chain.
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JavaScript: The Good Parts (Douglas Crockford)
- Highlight Loc. 704  | Added on Saturday, November 05, 2011, 12:05 AM

The || operator can be used to fill in default values:
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JavaScript: The Good Parts (Douglas Crockford)
- Highlight Loc. 852-53  | Added on Saturday, November 05, 2011, 02:25 PM

In addition to the declared parameters, every function receives two additional parameters: this and arguments.
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JavaScript: The Good Parts (Douglas Crockford)
- Highlight Loc. 854-56  | Added on Saturday, November 05, 2011, 02:25 PM

There are four patterns of invocation in JavaScript: the method invocation pattern, the function invocation pattern, the constructor invocation pattern, and the apply invocation pattern.
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JavaScript: The Good Parts (Douglas Crockford)
- Highlight Loc. 1067  | Added on Saturday, November 05, 2011, 03:43 PM

it is best to declare all of the variables used in a function at the top of the function body.
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Anything You Want (Derek Sivers)
- Bookmark on Page 7 | Loc. 92  | Added on Sunday, November 13, 2011, 10:09 PM


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The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, Volumes 1 and 2 (Roald Dahl)
- Bookmark Loc. 2156  | Added on Wednesday, November 16, 2011, 11:42 PM


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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 137-40  | Added on Thursday, December 01, 2011, 10:52 PM

Priming THE MISCONCEPTION: You know when you are being influenced and how it is affecting your behavior. THE TRUTH: You are unaware of the constant nudging you receive from ideas formed in your unconscious mind.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 305-8  | Added on Thursday, December 01, 2011, 10:53 PM

Confabulation THE MISCONCEPTION: You know when you are lying to yourself. THE TRUTH: You are often ignorant of your motivations and create fictional narratives to explain your decisions, emotions, and history without realizing it.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 467-71  | Added on Thursday, December 01, 2011, 10:53 PM

Confirmation Bias THE MISCONCEPTION: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis. THE TRUTH: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information that confirmed what you believed, while ignoring information that challenged your preconceived notions.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 522-25  | Added on Thursday, December 01, 2011, 10:54 PM

Hindsight Bias THE MISCONCEPTION: After you learn something new, you remember how you were once ignorant or wrong. THE TRUTH: You often look back on the things you’ve just learned and assume you knew them or believed them all along.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 570-73  | Added on Thursday, December 01, 2011, 10:54 PM

The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy THE MISCONCEPTION: You take randomness into account when determining cause and effect. THE TRUTH: You tend to ignore random chance when the results seem meaningful or when you want a random event to have a meaningful cause.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 671-74  | Added on Thursday, December 01, 2011, 10:54 PM

Procrastination THE MISCONCEPTION: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well. THE TRUTH: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 784-86  | Added on Thursday, December 01, 2011, 10:55 PM

Normalcy Bias THE MISCONCEPTION: Your fight-or-flight instincts kick in and you panic when disaster strikes. THE TRUTH: You often become abnormally calm and pretend everything is normal in a crisis.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 927-30  | Added on Thursday, December 01, 2011, 10:55 PM

Introspection THE MISCONCEPTION: You know why you like the things you like and feel the way you feel. THE TRUTH: The origin of certain emotional states is unavailable to you, and when pressed to explain them, you will just make something up.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 988-92  | Added on Thursday, December 01, 2011, 10:56 PM

The Availability Heuristic THE MISCONCEPTION: With the advent of mass media, you understand how the world works based on statistics and facts culled from many examples. THE TRUTH: You are far more likely to believe something is commonplace if you can find just one example of it, and you are far less likely to believe in something you’ve never seen or heard of before.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1029-31  | Added on Friday, December 02, 2011, 11:04 PM

The Bystander Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: When someone is hurt, people rush to their aid. THE TRUTH: The more people who witness a person in distress, the less likely it is that any one person will help.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1084-87  | Added on Friday, December 02, 2011, 11:13 PM

The Dunning-Kruger Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: You can predict how well you would perform in any situation. THE TRUTH: You are generally pretty bad at estimating your competence and the difficulty of complex tasks.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Bookmark Loc. 1116  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 09:01 AM


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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1116  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 09:04 AM

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1130-33  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 09:06 AM

Apophenia THE MISCONCEPTION: Some coincidences are so miraculous, they must have meaning. THE TRUTH: Coincidences are a routine part of life, even the seemingly miraculous ones. Any meaning applied to them comes from your mind.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1154-55  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 09:10 AM

Apophenia is an umbrella term that encompasses other phenomena, like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy and pareidolia.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1194-97  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 09:21 AM

Brand Loyalty THE MISCONCEPTION: You prefer the things you own over the things you don’t because you made rational choices when you bought them. THE TRUTH: You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1263-66  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 09:59 PM

The Argument from Authority THE MISCONCEPTION: You are more concerned with the validity of information than the person delivering it. THE TRUTH: The status and credentials of an individual greatly influence your perception of that individual’s message.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1307-10  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 10:08 PM

The Argument from Ignorance THE MISCONCEPTION: When you can’t explain something, you focus on what you can prove. THE TRUTH: When you are unsure of something, you are more likely to accept strange explanations.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1344-46  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 10:16 PM

The Straw Man Fallacy THE MISCONCEPTION: When you argue, you try to stick to the facts. THE TRUTH: In any argument, anger will tempt you to reframe your opponent’s position.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1377-80  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 10:21 PM

The Ad Hominem Fallacy THE MISCONCEPTION: If you can’t trust someone, you should ignore that person’s claims. THE TRUTH: What someone says and why they say it should be judged separately.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1420-23  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 10:31 PM

The Just-World Fallacy THE MISCONCEPTION: People who are losing at the game of life must have done something to deserve it. THE TRUTH: The beneficiaries of good fortune often do nothing to earn it, and bad people often get away with their actions without consequences.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Bookmark Loc. 1424  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 10:31 PM


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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1484-87  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 10:50 PM

The Public Goods Game THE MISCONCEPTION: We could create a system with no regulations where everyone would contribute to the good of society, everyone would benefit, and everyone would be happy. THE TRUTH: Without some form of regulation, slackers and cheaters will crash economic systems because people don’t want to feel like suckers.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 69 | Loc. 1183-84  | Added on Tuesday, December 06, 2011, 10:39 PM

Slovic’s experimental work suggests that we intuitively care most about a single, identifiable human life, less about two, and we grow more callous as the body count rises.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1248-49  | Added on Tuesday, December 06, 2011, 10:47 PM

The fact that it may often be difficult, or even impossible, to know what the consequences of our thoughts and actions will be does not mean that there is some other basis for human values that is worth worrying about.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1521-23  | Added on Wednesday, December 07, 2011, 10:45 PM

The urge to help others and discourage cheating is something that helped primates like you survive in small groups for millions of years, but when the system becomes gigantic and abstract like the budget for a nation or the welfare system for an entire state, it becomes difficult to make sense of the world through those old evolutionary behaviors.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1529-31  | Added on Wednesday, December 07, 2011, 10:47 PM

The Ultimatum Game THE MISCONCEPTION: You choose to accept or refuse an offer based on logic. THE TRUTH: When it comes to making a deal, you base your decision on your status.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1565-68  | Added on Wednesday, December 07, 2011, 10:52 PM

Subjective Validation THE MISCONCEPTION: You are skeptical of generalities. THE TRUTH: You are prone to believing vague statements and predictions are true, especially if they are positive and address you personally.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1626-28  | Added on Wednesday, December 07, 2011, 11:02 PM

Cult Indoctrination THE MISCONCEPTION: You are too smart to join a cult. THE TRUTH: Cults are populated by people just like you.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1661-64  | Added on Friday, December 09, 2011, 11:26 PM

Groupthink THE MISCONCEPTION: Problems are easier to solve when a group of people get together to discuss solutions. THE TRUTH: The desire to reach consensus and avoid confrontation hinders progress.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1704-7  | Added on Friday, December 09, 2011, 11:32 PM

Supernormal Releasers THE MISCONCEPTION: Men who have sex with RealDolls are insane, and women who marry eighty-year-old billionaires are gold diggers. THE TRUTH: The RealDoll and rich old sugar daddies are both supernormal releasers.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1768-71  | Added on Sunday, December 11, 2011, 10:23 PM

The Affect Heuristic THE MISCONCEPTION: You calculate what is risky or rewarding and always choose to maximize gains while minimizing losses. THE TRUTH: You depend on emotions to tell you if something is good or bad, greatly overestimate rewards, and tend to stick to your first impressions.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1779-80  | Added on Sunday, December 11, 2011, 10:47 PM

The tendency to make poor decisions and ignore odds in favor of your gut feelings is called the affect heuristic.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1877  | Added on Monday, December 12, 2011, 10:45 PM

It creates vegetarian smokers.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1894-96  | Added on Monday, December 12, 2011, 10:49 PM

Dunbar’s Number THE MISCONCEPTION: There is a Rolodex in your mind with the names and faces of everyone you’ve ever known. THE TRUTH: You can maintain relationships and keep up with only around 150 people at once.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1952-54  | Added on Monday, December 12, 2011, 10:57 PM

Selling Out THE MISCONCEPTION: Both consumerism and capitalism are sustained by corporations and advertising. THE TRUTH: Both consumerism and capitalism are driven by competition among consumers for status.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 1991  | Added on Thursday, December 15, 2011, 10:56 PM

The counterculture, the indie fans, and the underground stars—they are the driving force behind capitalism. They are the engine.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Bookmark Loc. 1992  | Added on Thursday, December 15, 2011, 10:56 PM


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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2003-5  | Added on Thursday, December 15, 2011, 10:58 PM

Having a dissenting opinion on movies, music, or clothes, or owning clever or obscure possessions, is the way middle-class people fight one another for status. They can’t out-consume one another because they can’t afford it, but they can out-taste one another.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2017-18  | Added on Thursday, December 15, 2011, 11:00 PM

Competition for status is built into the human experience at the biological level. Poor people compete with resources. The middle class competes with selection. The wealthy compete with possessions.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2020-23  | Added on Thursday, December 15, 2011, 11:01 PM

Self-Serving Bias THE MISCONCEPTION: You evaluate yourself based on past successes and defeats. THE TRUTH: You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent, and more skilled than you are.
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The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, Volumes 1 and 2 (Roald Dahl)
- Bookmark Loc. 2880  | Added on Friday, December 16, 2011, 11:49 PM


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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1502-3  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 10:52 PM

It seems abundantly clear that many people are simply wrong about morality—just as many people are wrong about physics, biology, history, and everything else worth understanding.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 1524-25  | Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, 10:56 PM

it is now well known that our feeling of reasoning objectively is often illusory.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2074-77  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 03:38 PM

The Spotlight Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: When you are around others, you feel as if everyone is noticing every aspect of your appearance and behavior. THE TRUTH: People devote little attention to you unless prompted to.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Bookmark Loc. 2116  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 03:42 PM


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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2116-19  | Added on Saturday, December 31, 2011, 03:43 PM

The Third Person Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: You believe your opinions and decisions are based on experience and facts, while those who disagree with you are falling for the lies and propaganda of sources you don’t trust. THE TRUTH: Everyone believes the people they disagree with are gullible, and everyone thinks they are far less susceptible to persuasion than they truly are.
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The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, Volumes 1 and 2 (Roald Dahl)
- Bookmark Loc. 3237  | Added on Monday, January 16, 2012, 10:24 PM


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The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, Volumes 1 and 2 (Roald Dahl)
- Bookmark Loc. 3432  | Added on Monday, January 23, 2012, 10:35 PM


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The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, Volumes 1 and 2 (Roald Dahl)
- Bookmark Loc. 3635  | Added on Wednesday, January 25, 2012, 10:49 PM


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Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 1086-87  | Added on Tuesday, March 06, 2012, 09:47 PM

Just as the Big Bang theory is far more interesting than the creation story in Genesis, so the story that science can tell us about the natural world is far more interesting than any fable about magic pills concocted by an alternative
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Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 1086-87  | Added on Tuesday, March 06, 2012, 09:47 PM

Just as the Big Bang theory is far more interesting than the creation story in Genesis, so the story that science can tell us about the natural world is far more interesting than any fable about magic pills concocted by an alternative therapist.
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Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 2307-8  | Added on Tuesday, March 13, 2012, 10:52 PM

the placebo is not about the mechanics of a sugar pill, it is about the cultural meaning of an intervention, which includes, amongst other things, your expectations, and the expectations of the people tending to you and measuring you.
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Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 2879  | Added on Thursday, March 15, 2012, 10:32 PM

*
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Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight on Page 215 | Loc. 3467-69  | Added on Friday, March 16, 2012, 11:16 PM

Not only has publication bias been demonstrated in many fields of medicine, but a paper has even found evidence of publication bias in studies of publication bias. Here is the funnel plot for that paper. This is what passes for humour in the world of evidence-based medicine.
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Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
- Bookmark on Page 237 | Loc. 3806  | Added on Saturday, March 17, 2012, 05:10 PM


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Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight on Page 255 | Loc. 4089-92  | Added on Sunday, March 25, 2012, 10:51 PM

Intuitions are valuable for all kinds of things, especially in the social domain: deciding if your girlfriend is cheating on you, perhaps, or whether a business partner is trustworthy. But for mathematical issues, or assessing causal relationships, intuitions are often completely wrong, because they rely on shortcuts which have arisen as handy ways to solve complex cognitive problems rapidly, but at a cost of inaccuracies, misfires and oversensitivity.
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Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
- Bookmark on Page 323 | Loc. 5177  | Added on Thursday, April 05, 2012, 03:42 PM


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Bad Science (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 5363-64  | Added on Thursday, April 05, 2012, 04:16 PM

Just because big pharma can behave badly, that does not mean that sugar pills work better than placebo, nor does it mean that MMR causes autism.
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Free Will (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 256-57  | Added on Monday, April 09, 2012, 10:36 PM

Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? Of course not.
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Free Will (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 259-60  | Added on Sunday, April 15, 2012, 05:39 PM

Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
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Free Will (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 319-20  | Added on Sunday, April 15, 2012, 10:17 PM

People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about.
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Free Will (Sam Harris)
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you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world.
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Free Will (Sam Harris)
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parts.15 You can do what you decide to do—but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.
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Free Will (Sam Harris)
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I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.
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Free Will (Sam Harris)
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Free Will (Sam Harris)
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Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do?
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Free Will (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 64 | Loc. 647-48  | Added on Thursday, April 26, 2012, 11:16 AM

The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.
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Free Will (Sam Harris)
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Most people’s view of the mind is implicitly dualist and libertarian and not materialist and compatibilist. . . . That is, it requires the rejection of determinism and an implicit commitment to some kind of magical mental causation . . . contrary to legal and philosophical orthodoxy, determinism really does threaten free will and responsibility as we intuitively understand them
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Free Will (Sam Harris)
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16. Einstein (following Schopenhauer) once made the same point: Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).
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Free Will (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 756-57  | Added on Thursday, April 26, 2012, 11:20 AM

17. As Jerry Coyne points out (personal communication), this notion of counterfactual freedom is also scientifically untestable. What evidence could possibly be put forward to show that one could have acted differently in the past?
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2166-68  | Added on Thursday, April 26, 2012, 11:30 AM

Catharsis THE MISCONCEPTION: Venting your anger is an effective way to reduce stress and prevent lashing out at friends and family. THE TRUTH: Venting increases aggressive behavior over time.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2229-32  | Added on Wednesday, August 15, 2012, 11:35 PM

The Misinformation Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: Memories are played back like recordings. THE TRUTH: Memories are constructed anew each time from whatever information is currently available, which makes them highly permeable to influences from the present.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2335-37  | Added on Monday, August 20, 2012, 11:40 PM

Conformity THE MISCONCEPTION: You are a strong individual who doesn’t conform unless forced to. THE TRUTH: It takes little more than an authority figure or social pressure to get you to obey, because conformity is a survival instinct.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2419-22  | Added on Sunday, September 02, 2012, 11:43 PM

Extinction Burst THE MISCONCEPTION: If you stop engaging in a bad habit, the habit will gradually diminish until it disappears from your life. THE TRUTH: Any time you quit something cold turkey, your brain will make a last-ditch effort to return you to your habit.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2491-93  | Added on Tuesday, September 04, 2012, 10:37 PM

Social Loafing THE MISCONCEPTION: When you are joined by others in a task, you work harder and become more accomplished. THE TRUTH: Once part of a group, you tend to put in less effort because you know your work will be pooled together with others’.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2505  | Added on Tuesday, September 04, 2012, 10:39 PM

You put in less effort when in a group than you would if working alone on the same project.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2525-28  | Added on Tuesday, September 04, 2012, 10:41 PM

The Illusion of Transparency THE MISCONCEPTION: When your emotions run high, people can look at you and tell what you are thinking and feeling. THE TRUTH: Your subjective experience is not observable, and you overestimate how much you telegraph your inner thoughts and emotions.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2599-2602  | Added on Tuesday, September 04, 2012, 10:50 PM

Learned Helplessness THE MISCONCEPTION: If you are in a bad situation, you will do whatever you can do to escape it. THE TRUTH: If you feel like you aren’t in control of your destiny, you will give up and accept whatever situation you are in.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2657-59  | Added on Tuesday, September 04, 2012, 10:58 PM

Embodied Cognition THE MISCONCEPTION: Your opinions of people and events are based on objective evaluation. THE TRUTH: You translate your physical world into words, and then believe those words.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2697-99  | Added on Tuesday, September 04, 2012, 11:05 PM

The Anchoring Effect THE MISCONCEPTION: You rationally analyze all factors before making a choice or determining value. THE TRUTH: Your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2770-73  | Added on Thursday, September 06, 2012, 08:15 AM

Attention THE MISCONCEPTION: You see everything going on before your eyes, taking in all the information like a camera. THE TRUTH: You are aware only of a small amount of the total information your eyes take in, and even less is processed by your conscious mind and remembered.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2812-13  | Added on Thursday, September 06, 2012, 08:21 AM

Reality, as you experience it, is a virtual experience generated by the brain based on the inputs coming in from your senses. You don’t get a raw feed from those inputs; instead, you get an edited version.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2851  | Added on Thursday, September 06, 2012, 08:37 AM

You choose what to see more than you realize, and then you form beliefs without taking into account your selective vision.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2854-57  | Added on Thursday, September 06, 2012, 08:38 AM

Self-Handicapping THE MISCONCEPTION: In all you do, you strive for success. THE TRUTH: You often create conditions for failure ahead of time to protect your ego.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2906-9  | Added on Friday, September 07, 2012, 09:04 AM

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies THE MISCONCEPTION: Predictions about your future are subject to forces beyond your control. THE TRUTH: Just believing a future event will happen can cause it to happen if the event depends on human behavior.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 2967-70  | Added on Friday, September 07, 2012, 06:02 PM

The Moment THE MISCONCEPTION: You are one person, and your happiness is based on being content with your life. THE TRUTH: You are multiple selves, and happiness is based on satisfying all of them.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 3009-11  | Added on Friday, September 07, 2012, 06:07 PM

Consistency Bias THE MISCONCEPTION: You know how your opinions have changed over time. THE TRUTH: Unless you consciously keep tabs on your progress, you assume the way you feel now is the way you have always felt.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 3074-78  | Added on Tuesday, September 11, 2012, 08:58 AM

The Representativeness Heuristic THE MISCONCEPTION: Knowing a person’s history makes it easier to determine what sort of person they are. THE TRUTH: You jump to conclusions based on how representative a person seems to be of a preconceived character type. Your
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 3074-77  | Added on Tuesday, September 11, 2012, 08:58 AM

The Representativeness Heuristic THE MISCONCEPTION: Knowing a person’s history makes it easier to determine what sort of person they are. THE TRUTH: You jump to conclusions based on how representative a person seems to be of a preconceived character type.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 3131-34  | Added on Tuesday, September 11, 2012, 06:52 PM

Expectation THE MISCONCEPTION: Wine is a complicated elixir, full of subtle flavors only an expert can truly distinguish, and experienced tasters are impervious to deception. THE TRUTH: Wine experts and consumers can be fooled by altering their expectations.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 3196-98  | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 06:40 PM

The Illusion of Control THE MISCONCEPTION: You know how much control you have over your surroundings. THE TRUTH: You often believe you have control over outcomes that are either random or are too complex to predict.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 3221-22  | Added on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 06:44 PM

Your brain is always looking for patterns and sending little squirts of happy throughout your body when it finds them, but like faces in clouds, you often see patterns where none exist.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 3248-50  | Added on Thursday, September 13, 2012, 08:55 AM

The researchers concluded most people engage in magical thinking to some degree, assuming their thoughts can influence things outside of their control.
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You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (David McRaney)
- Highlight Loc. 3301-3  | Added on Friday, September 14, 2012, 08:50 AM

The Fundamental Attribution Error THE MISCONCEPTION: Other people’s behavior is the reflection of their personality. THE TRUTH: Other people’s behavior is more the result of the situation than their disposition.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 1875-79  | Added on Thursday, September 27, 2012, 07:11 AM

planning.108 But why is the conscious decision to do another person harm particularly blameworthy? Because consciousness is, among other things, the context in which our intentions become completely available to us. What we do subsequent to conscious planning tends to most fully reflect the global properties of our minds—our beliefs, desires, goals, prejudices, etc. If, after weeks of deliberation, library research, and debate with your friends, you still decide to kill the king—well, then killing the king really reflects the sort of person you are. Consequently, it makes sense for the rest of society to worry about you.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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And the mistakes people tend to make across a wide range of reasoning tasks are not mere errors; they are systematic errors that are strongly associated both within and across tasks. As one might expect, many of these errors decrease as cognitive ability increases.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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So while knowledge is increasingly open-source, ignorance is, too. It
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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So while knowledge is increasingly open-source, ignorance is, too. It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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It is worth reflecting on what a reasoning bias actually is: a bias is not merely a source of error; it is a reliable pattern of error. Every bias, therefore, reveals something about the structure of the human mind.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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There is no question that human beings regularly fail to achieve the norms of rationality. But we do not merely fail—we fail reliably.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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Does a lone psychotic become sane merely by attracting a crowd of devotees?
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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Introspection offers no clue that our experience of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, depends upon voltage changes and chemical interactions taking place inside our heads. And yet a century and a half of brain science declares it to be so.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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mystery.77 As is often the case with religious apology, it is a case of heads, faith wins; tails, reason loses.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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There is an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. This isn’t surprising, as very few scientific truths are self-evident and many are deeply counterintuitive. It is by no means obvious that empty space has structure or that we share a common ancestor with both the housefly and the banana.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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Despite our perennial bad behavior, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable. Our powers of empathy are clearly growing. Today, we are surely more likely to act for the benefit of humanity as a whole than at any point in the past.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 3087-89  | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 06:04 AM

I have argued that they cannot be, as anything of value must be valuable to someone (whether actually or potentially)—and, therefore, its value should be attributable to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 181 | Loc. 3099-3100  | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 06:08 AM

I believe that conservatives have the same morality as liberals do, they just have different ideas about how harm accrues in this universe.3
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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However, most of the research done on happiness suggests that people actually become less happy when they have children and do not begin to approach their prior level of happiness until their children leave home.10
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 3225-27  | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:28 AM

However, a famous study of human achievement suggests that one of the most reliable ways to diminish a person’s contributions to society is for that person to start a family.11
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 190 | Loc. 3262-64  | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:34 AM

Whether morality becomes a proper branch of science is not really the point. Is economics a true science yet? Judging from recent events, it wouldn’t appear so. Perhaps a deep understanding of economics will always elude us. But does anyone doubt that there are better and worse ways to structure an economy?
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 3273-76  | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:36 AM

For nearly a century, the moral relativism of science has given faith-based religion—that great engine of ignorance and bigotry—a nearly uncontested claim to being the only universal framework for moral wisdom. As a result, the most powerful societies on earth spend their time debating issues like gay marriage when they should be focused on problems like nuclear proliferation, genocide, energy security, climate change, poverty, and failing schools.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3397-99  | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 07:50 AM

I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “antirealism,” “emotivism,” etc., directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3567-69  | Added on Saturday, October 20, 2012, 08:15 AM

To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal) because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal) because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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It is wrong to force women and girls to wear burqas because it is unpleasant and impractical to live fully veiled, because this practice perpetuates a view of women as being the property of men, and because it keeps the men who enforce it brutally obtuse to the possibility of real equality and communication between the sexes.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
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Compatibilists, like Daniel Dennett, maintain that free will is compatible with causal determinism (see Dennett, 2003; for other compatibilist arguments see Ayer, Chisholm, Strawson, Frankfurt, Dennett, and Watson—all in Watson, 1982).
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 3976-81  | Added on Sunday, October 28, 2012, 11:51 AM

The neuroscientists Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen make the same point: Most people’s view of the mind is implicitly dualist and libertarian and not materialist and compatibilist … [I]ntuitive free will is libertarian, not compatibilist. That is, it requires the rejection of determinism and an implicit commitment to some kind of magical mental causation … contrary to legal and philosophical orthodoxy, determinism really does threaten free will and responsibility as we intuitively understand them (J. Greene & Cohen, 2004, pp. 1779–1780).
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 222 | Loc. 4102-4  | Added on Sunday, October 28, 2012, 12:09 PM

When comparing mental states, the reality of human consciousness is a given. We need not understand how consciousness relates to the behavior of atoms to investigate how emotions like love, compassion, trust, greed, fear, and anger differ (and interact) in neurophysiological terms.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 4219-22  | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 09:01 AM

36. There are many factors that bias our judgment, including: arbitrary anchors on estimates of quantity, availability biases on estimates of frequency, insensitivity to the prior probability of outcomes, misconceptions of randomness, nonregressive predictions, insensitivity to sample size, illusory correlations, overconfidence, valuing of worthless evidence, hindsight bias, confirmation bias, biases based on ease of imaginability, as well as other nonnormative modes of thinking.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 227 | Loc. 4228-31  | Added on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, 09:02 AM

As Stanovich and West (2000) observe, what serves the genes does not necessarily advance the interests of the individual. We could also add that what serves the individual in one context may not serve him in another. The cognitive and emotional mechanisms that may (or may not) have optimized us for face-to-face conflict (and its resolution) have clearly not prepared us to negotiate conflicts waged from afar—whether with email or other long-range weaponry.
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The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris)
- Highlight on Page 236 | Loc. 4524-29  | Added on Monday, November 05, 2012, 08:19 AM

In fact, there are whole sections of the New Testament, like the Book of Revelation, that were long considered spurious, that were included in the Bible only after many centuries of neglect; and there are other books, like the Shepherd of Hermas, that were venerated as part of the Bible for hundreds of years only to be rejected finally as false scripture. Consequently, it is true to say that generations of Christians lived and died having been guided by scripture that is now deemed to be both mistaken and incomplete by the faithful. In fact, to this day, Roman Catholics and Protestants cannot agree on the full contents of the Bible. Needless to say, such a haphazard and all-too-human process of cobbling together the authoritative word of the Creator of the Universe seems a poor basis for believing that the miracles of Jesus actually occurred.
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L’Étranger (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 452  | Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2012, 08:20 AM

J’ai dit que cela m’était égal
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L’Étranger (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 843-44  | Added on Friday, November 16, 2012, 07:03 PM

J’ai compris alors qu’un homme qui n’aurait vécu qu’un seul jour pourrait sans peine vivre cent ans dans une prison. Il aurait assez de souvenirs pour ne pas s’ennuyer.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 164-65  | Added on Thursday, December 06, 2012, 10:44 PM

planet.4 From this perspective, reverse-engineering the human brain may be regarded as the most important project in the universe.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 191-92  | Added on Thursday, December 06, 2012, 10:51 PM

If understanding language and other phenomena through statistical analysis does not count as true understanding, then humans have no understanding either.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 208-9  | Added on Friday, December 07, 2012, 08:32 AM

The operating principle of the neocortex is arguably the most important idea in the world, as it is capable of representing all knowledge and skills as well as creating new knowledge.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 52 | Loc. 777-78  | Added on Tuesday, December 18, 2012, 07:15 PM

We often misrecognize people and things and words because our threshold for confirming an expected pattern is too low.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 1130-32  | Added on Thursday, January 10, 2013, 08:52 AM

Natural selection does nothing even close to striving for intelligence. The process is driven by differences in the survival and reproduction rates of replicating organisms in a particular environment. Over time, the organisms acquire designs that adapt them for survival and reproduction in that environment, period; nothing pulls them in any direction other than success there and then.”
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 82 | Loc. 1207-13  | Added on Thursday, January 10, 2013, 09:58 PM

When scientists have thought about the pathways of the brain for the last hundred years or so, the typical image or model that comes to mind is that these pathways might resemble a bowl of spaghetti—separate pathways that have little particular spatial pattern in relation to one another. Using magnetic resonance imaging, we were able to investigate this question experimentally. And what we found was that rather than being haphazardly arranged or independent pathways, we find that all of the pathways of the brain taken together fit together in a single exceedingly simple structure. They basically look like a cube. They basically run in three perpendicular directions, and in each one of those three directions the pathways are highly parallel to each other and arranged in arrays. So, instead of independent spaghettis, we see that the connectivity of the brain is, in a sense, a single coherent structure.”
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 94 | Loc. 1372-75  | Added on Friday, January 11, 2013, 06:29 PM

Although we experience the illusion of receiving high-resolution images from our eyes, what the optic nerve actually sends to the brain is just a series of outlines and clues about points of interest in our visual field. We then essentially hallucinate the world from cortical memories that interpret a series of movies with very low data rates that arrive in parallel channels.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 1762-66  | Added on Friday, January 18, 2013, 08:15 AM

As we have seen, it is not just a metaphor to state that there is information contained in our neocortex, and it is frightening to contemplate that none of this information is backed up today. There is, of course, one way in which we do back up some of the information in our brains—by writing it down. The ability to transfer at least some of our thinking to a medium that can outlast our biological bodies was a huge step forward, but a great deal of data in our brains continues to remain vulnerable.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 127 | Loc. 1811  | Added on Monday, January 21, 2013, 08:29 AM

I would not expect such an “uploading” technology to be available until around the 2040s.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 174 | Loc. 2455-56  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:22 PM

In our digital brain we would also back up old memories before discarding them from the active neocortex, a precaution we can’t take in our biological brains.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 2481-83  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:31 PM

I would also provide a critical thinking module, which would perform a continual background scan of all of the existing patterns, reviewing their compatibility with the other patterns (ideas) in this software neocortex. We have no such facility in our biological brains, which is why people can hold completely inconsistent thoughts with equanimity.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 2488  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:32 PM

This critical thinking module would run as a continual background task. It would be very beneficial if human brains did the same thing.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 2503-4  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 06:59 PM

The human brain appears to be able to handle only four simultaneous lists at a time (without the aid of tools such as computers), but there is no reason for an artificial neocortex to have such a limitation.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 2508-9  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 07:00 PM

Finally, our new brain needs a purpose. A purpose is expressed as a series of goals. In the case of our biological brains, our goals are established by the pleasure and fear centers that we have inherited from the old brain.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2516-18  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 07:02 PM

As nonbiological brains become as capable as biological ones of effecting changes in the world—indeed, ultimately far more capable than unenhanced biological ones—we will need to consider their moral education. A good place to start would be with one old idea from our religious traditions: the golden rule.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2527-28  | Added on Friday, January 25, 2013, 07:04 PM

In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them. —John von Neumann
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 2736-38  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 11:26 PM

There is considerable plasticity in the brain, which enables us to learn. But there is far greater plasticity in a computer, which can completely restructure its methods by changing its software.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 2738  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 11:26 PM

Thus, in that respect, a computer will be able to emulate the brain, but the converse is not the case.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 2745-49  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 11:28 PM

Von Neumann was deeply aware of the increasing pace of progress and its profound implications for humanity’s future. A year after his death in 1957, fellow mathematician Stan Ulam quoted him as having said in the early 1950s that “the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” This is the first known use of the word “singularity” in the context of human technological history.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 2836-38  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 11:41 PM

British philosopher Colin McGinn (born in 1950) writes that discussing “consciousness can reduce even the most fastidious thinker to blabbering incoherence.”
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 202 | Loc. 2869-70  | Added on Saturday, January 26, 2013, 11:48 PM

If you were at a cocktail party and there were both “normal” humans and zombies, how would you tell the difference? Perhaps this sounds like a cocktail party you have attended.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 2943-46  | Added on Sunday, January 27, 2013, 12:04 AM

English physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose (born in 1931) took a different leap of faith in proposing the source of consciousness, though his also concerned the microtubules—specifically, their purported quantum computing abilities. His reasoning, although not explicitly stated, seemed to be that consciousness is mysterious, and a quantum event is also mysterious, so they must be linked in some way.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 3007-9  | Added on Monday, January 28, 2013, 07:27 AM

If you do accept the leap of faith that a nonbiological entity that is convincing in its reactions to qualia is actually conscious, then consider what that implies: namely that consciousness is an emergent property of the overall pattern of an entity, not the substrate it runs on.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 3012-13  | Added on Monday, January 28, 2013, 07:27 AM

The question as to whether or not an entity is conscious is therefore not a scientific one.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 3038-39  | Added on Monday, January 28, 2013, 06:03 PM

It is difficult to maintain that a few-days-old embryo is conscious unless one takes a panprotopsychist position, but even in these terms it would rank below the simplest animal in terms of consciousness.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 218 | Loc. 3115-16  | Added on Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 06:18 PM

Before brains there was no color or sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably little sense and no feeling or emotion. —Roger W. Sperry
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 223 | Loc. 3197-98  | Added on Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 09:53 PM

Evolution also moves toward greater complexity, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and the ability to express more transcendent emotions, such as love.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 225 | Loc. 3239-40  | Added on Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 09:58 PM

While these observations certainly support the idea of plasticity in the neocortex, their more interesting implication is that we each appear to have two brains, not one, and we can do pretty well with either.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 229 | Loc. 3290-91  | Added on Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 10:13 PM

In each of these cases, one of the hemispheres believes that it has made a decision that it in fact never made. To what extent is that true for the decisions we make every day?
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 235 | Loc. 3388-92  | Added on Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 10:27 PM

philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) wrote that “everyone believes himself a priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life…. But a posteriori, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns.”19
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 239 | Loc. 3445-47  | Added on Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 10:37 PM

Thus even though our decisions are determined (because our bodies and brains are part of a deterministic universe), they are nonetheless inherently unpredictable because we live in (and are part of) a class IV automaton. We cannot predict the future of a class IV automaton except to let the future unfold.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 240 | Loc. 3465  | Added on Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 10:39 PM

Nonetheless I will continue to act as if I have free will and to believe in it, so long as I don’t have to explain why.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 255 | Loc. 3666-68  | Added on Thursday, January 31, 2013, 05:58 PM

But when one paradigm runs out of steam (for example, when engineers were no longer able to reduce the size and cost of vacuum tubes in the 1950s), it creates research pressure to create the next paradigm, and so another S-curve of progress begins.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 267 | Loc. 3767-69  | Added on Monday, February 04, 2013, 08:35 AM

So it is with the law of accelerating returns: Each technology project and contributor is unpredictable, yet the overall trajectory, as quantified by basic measures of price/performance and capacity, nonetheless follows a remarkably predictable path.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 277 | Loc. 3923-24  | Added on Monday, February 04, 2013, 06:37 PM

Intelligence evolved because it was useful for survival—a fact that may seem obvious, but one with which not everyone agrees.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 281 | Loc. 3979-81  | Added on Monday, February 04, 2013, 09:46 PM

The last invention that biological evolution needed to make—the neocortex—is inevitably leading to the last invention that humanity needs to make—truly intelligent machines—and the design of one is inspiring the other. Biological evolution is continuing but technological evolution is moving a million times faster than the former.
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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil)
- Highlight on Page 282 | Loc. 3999-4000  | Added on Monday, February 04, 2013, 09:48 PM

In either scenario, waking up the universe, and then intelligently deciding its fate by infusing it with our human intelligence in its nonbiological form, is our destiny.
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What I Believe (Bertrand Russell)
- Highlight on Page 29 | Added on Thursday, February 07, 2013, 08:50 AM

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Knowledge and love are both indefinitely extensible; therefore, however good a life may be, a better life can be imagined. Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.
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What I Believe (Bertrand Russell)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Added on Friday, February 08, 2013, 08:43 AM

The practical need of morals arises from the conflict of desires, whether of different people
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What I Believe (Bertrand Russell)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Added on Monday, February 11, 2013, 06:40 PM

Boys and girls should be taught respect for each other’s liberty; they should be made to feel that nothing gives one human being rights over another, and that jealousy and possessiveness kill love. They should be taught that to bring another human being into the world is a very serious matter, only to be undertaken when the child will have a reasonable prospect of health, good surroundings, and parental care.
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What I Believe (Bertrand Russell)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 08:48 AM

The harm to the murderer is wholly regrettable, like the pain of a surgical operation. It may be equally necessary, but it is not a subject for rejoicing.
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What I Believe (Bertrand Russell)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 08:49 AM

I merely wish to suggest that we should treat the criminal as we treat a man suffering from plague. Each is a public danger, each must have his liberty curtailed until he has ceased to be a danger.
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What I Believe (Bertrand Russell)
- Highlight on Page 49 | Added on Tuesday, February 12, 2013, 06:37 PM

To live a good life in the fullest sense a man must have a good education, friends, love, children (if he desires them), a sufficient income to keep him from want and grave anxiety, good health, and work which is not uninteresting.
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What I Believe (Bertrand Russell)
- Highlight on Page 50 | Added on Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 08:47 AM

There is no short cut to the good life, whether individual or social. To build up the good life, we must build up intelligence, self-control and sympathy. This is a quantitative matter, a matter of gradual improvement, of early training, of educational experiment. Only impatience prompts the belief in the possibility of sudden improvement. The gradual improvement that is possible, and the methods by which it may be achieved, are a matter for future science. But something can be said now.
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What I Believe (Bertrand Russell)
- Highlight on Page 57 | Added on Monday, February 18, 2013, 08:47 AM

There is probably no limit to what science can do in the way of increasing positive excellence. Health has already been greatly improved; in spite of the lamentations of those who idealise the past, we live longer and have fewer illnesses than any class or nation in the eighteenth century. With a little more application of the knowledge we already possess, we might be much healthier than we are. And future discoveries are likely to accelerate this process enormously
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 118-20  | Added on Thursday, February 21, 2013, 08:59 AM

Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux : c'est le suicide. Juger que la vie vaut ou ne vaut pas la peine d'être vécue, c'est répondre à la question fondamentale de la philosophie. Le reste, si le monde a trois dimensions, si l'esprit a neuf ou douze catégories, vient ensuite. Ce sont des jeux ; il faut d'abord répondre.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 470-72  | Added on Wednesday, March 13, 2013, 08:47 AM

Il existe un fait d'évidence qui semble tout à fait moral, c'est qu'un homme est toujours la proie de ses vérités. Une fois reconnues, il ne saurait s'en détacher. Il faut bien payer un peu. Un homme devenu conscient de l'absurde lui est lié pour jamais.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Bookmark Loc. 542  | Added on Monday, March 18, 2013, 07:23 AM


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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 551-52  | Added on Monday, March 18, 2013, 07:25 AM

L'important, disait l'abbé Galiani à Mme d'Epinay, n'est pas de guérir, mais de vivre avec ses maux.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Bookmark Loc. 552  | Added on Monday, March 18, 2013, 07:26 AM


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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 569-71  | Added on Monday, March 18, 2013, 07:29 AM

Mais si je reconnais les limites de la raison, je ne la nie pas pour autant, reconnaissant ses pouvoirs relatifs. Je veux seulement me tenir dans ce chemin moyen où l'intelligence peut rester claire.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 582-85  | Added on Tuesday, March 26, 2013, 08:23 AM

Ce cri n'a pas de quoi arrêter l'homme absurde. Chercher ce qui est vrai n'est pas chercher ce qui est souhaitable. Si pour échapper à la question angoissée : « Que serait donc la vie ? » il faut comme l'âne se nourrir des roses de l'illusion, plutôt que de se résigner au mensonge, l'esprit absurde préfère adopter sans trembler la réponse de Kierkegaard : « le désespoir ». Tout bien considéré, une âme déterminée s'en arrangera toujours.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 660-61  | Added on Saturday, April 13, 2013, 12:26 AM

C'est qu'en vérité le chemin importe peu, la volonté d'arriver suffit à tout.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 682-84  | Added on Saturday, April 13, 2013, 12:35 AM

Mon raisonnement veut être fidèle à l'évidence qui l'a éveillé. Cette évidence, c'est l'absurde. C'est ce divorce entre l'esprit qui désire et le monde qui déçoit, ma nostalgie d'unité, cet univers dispersé et la contradiction qui les enchaîne.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 735-39  | Added on Monday, April 15, 2013, 08:31 AM

L'une des seules positions philosophiques cohérentes, c'est ainsi la révolte. Elle est un confrontement perpétuel de l'homme et de sa propre obscurité. Elle est exigence d'une impossible transparence. Elle remet le monde en question à chacune de ses secondes. De même que le danger fournit à l'homme l'irremplaçable occasion de la saisir, de même la révolte métaphysique étend la conscience tout le long de l'expérience. Elle est cette présence constante de l'homme à lui-même. Elle n'est pas aspiration, elle est sans espoir. Cette révolte n'est que l'assurance d'un destin écrasant, moins la résignation qui devrait l’accompagner.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 763-66  | Added on Monday, April 15, 2013, 06:30 PM

Car devant Dieu, il y a moins un problème de la liberté qu'un problème du mal. On connaît l'alternative : ou nous ne sommes pas libres et Dieu tout-puissant est responsable du mal. Ou nous sommes libres et responsables mais Dieu n'est pas tout-puissant. Toutes les subtilités d'écoles n'ont rien ajouté ni soustrait au tranchant de ce paradoxe.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 778  | Added on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 08:37 AM

La mort est là comme seule réalité.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 778  | Added on Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 08:37 AM

La mort est là comme seule réalité. Après elle, les jeux sont faits.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 1119-20  | Added on Monday, April 29, 2013, 08:25 AM

Il vient toujours un temps où il faut choisir entre la contemplation et l'action. Cela s'appelle devenir un homme. Ces déchirements sont affreux.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 1205-6  | Added on Wednesday, May 01, 2013, 08:45 AM

À cet égard, la joie absurde par excellence, c'est la création. « L'art et rien que l'art, dit Nietzsche, nous avons l'art pour ne point mourir de la vérité. »
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 1209-10  | Added on Wednesday, May 01, 2013, 08:46 AM

Créer, c'est vivre deux fois.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 1278-80  | Added on Thursday, May 02, 2013, 07:39 AM

La fécondité et la grandeur d'un genre se mesurent souvent au déchet qui s'y trouve. Le nombre de mauvais romans ne doit pas faire oublier la grandeur des meilleurs.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 1793-94  | Added on Friday, May 03, 2013, 08:48 AM

« L'homme n'a fait qu'inventer Dieu pour ne pas se tuer. Voilà le résumé de l'histoire universelle jusqu'à ce moment. »
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 1607-8  | Added on Tuesday, May 07, 2013, 06:10 PM

Il y a dans la condition humaine, c'est le lieu commun de toutes les littératures, une absurdité fondamentale en même temps qu'une implacable grandeur.
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Le mythe de Sisyphe (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 1717-19  | Added on Wednesday, May 08, 2013, 07:36 PM

Mais si je sais cela, si je peux aussi l'admirer, je sais aussi que je ne cherche pas ce qui est universel, mais ce qui est vrai. Les deux peuvent ne pas coïncider.
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Le vieil homme et la mer (Ernest Hemingway)
- Highlight Loc. 783-84  | Added on Wednesday, May 29, 2013, 08:38 AM

« Je comprends pas bien tout ça, pensa-t-il. Mais c’est encore heureux qu’on ne soit pas obligé de faire la chasse au soleil, à la lune ou aux étoiles. On a assez de mal comme ça, à vivre sur la mer, et à tuer nos frères les poissons. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight Loc. 133-35  | Added on Friday, June 14, 2013, 09:01 AM

The fact that we need to refine what we mean by “common sense” in order to accommodate our understanding of nature is, to me, one of the most remarkable and liberating aspects of science. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight Loc. 135-36  | Added on Friday, June 14, 2013, 09:01 AM

Reality liberates us from the biases and misconceptions that have arisen because our intellects evolved through our animal ancestors, whose survival was based on whether predators might lurk behind trees or in caves and not on understanding the wave function of electrons in atoms. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight Loc. 137-38  | Added on Friday, June 14, 2013, 09:01 AM

Our modern conception of the universe is so foreign to what even scientists generally believed a mere century ago that it is a tribute to the power of the scientific method and the creativity and persistence of humans who want to understand it. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight Loc. 211-13  | Added on Tuesday, June 18, 2013, 08:43 AM

Nevertheless, the declaration of a First Cause still leaves open the question, “Who created the creator?” After all, what is the difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one? 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight Loc. 219-21  | Added on Tuesday, June 18, 2013, 08:44 AM

The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent of our desires. A world without God or purpose may seem harsh or pointless, but that alone doesn’t require God to actually exist. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight Loc. 259  | Added on Tuesday, June 18, 2013, 08:49 AM

Surely, invoking “God” to avoid difficult questions of “how” is merely intellectually lazy. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight Loc. 269-72  | Added on Tuesday, June 18, 2013, 08:51 AM

Science has been effective at furthering our understanding of nature because the scientific ethos is based on three key principles: (1) follow the evidence wherever it leads; (2) if one has a theory, one needs to be willing to try to prove it wrong as much as one tries to prove that it is right; (3) the ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one’s a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one’s theoretical models. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 448-49  | Added on Friday, June 21, 2013, 08:40 AM

Hubble’s law: There is a linear relationship between recessional velocity and galaxy distance. Namely, galaxies that are ever more distant are moving away from us with faster velocities! 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 499-502  | Added on Tuesday, June 25, 2013, 08:33 AM

One of the most poetic facts I know about the universe is that essentially every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded. Moreover, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than did those in your right. We are all, literally, star children, and our bodies made of stardust. How do we know this? Well, we can extrapolate our picture of the Big Bang back to a time when the universe was about 1 second old, and we calculate that all observed 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 499-501  | Added on Tuesday, June 25, 2013, 08:34 AM

One of the most poetic facts I know about the universe is that essentially every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded. Moreover, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than did those in your right. We are all, literally, star children, and our bodies made of stardust. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 511-12  | Added on Tuesday, June 25, 2013, 08:37 AM

This is one of the most famous, significant, and successful predictions telling us the Big Bang really happened. Only a hot Big Bang can produce the observed abundance of light elements and maintain consistency with the current observed expansion of the universe. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 519-21  | Added on Tuesday, June 25, 2013, 08:39 AM

Over the course of the history of our galaxy, about 200 million stars have exploded. These myriad stars sacrificed themselves, if you wish, so that one day you could be born. I suppose that qualifies them as much as anything else for the role of saviors. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 595-96  | Added on Thursday, June 27, 2013, 09:11 AM

The job of physics is not to invent things we cannot see to explain things we can see, but to figure out how to see what we cannot see—to see what was previously invisible, the known unknowns. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 769-72  | Added on Tuesday, July 02, 2013, 08:57 AM

In fact, you may be old enough have seen its effects without realizing it, if you remember the days before cable television, when channels used to end their broadcast days in the wee morning hours and not run infomercials all night. When they went off the air, after showing a test pattern, the screen would revert to static. About 1 percent of that static you saw on the television screen was radiation left over from the Big Bang. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 928-31  | Added on Wednesday, July 24, 2013, 03:42 PM

By nothing, I do not mean nothing, but rather nothing—in this case, the nothingness we normally call empty space. That is to say, if I take a region of space and get rid of everything within it—dust, gas, people, and even the radiation passing through, namely absolutely everything within that region—if the remaining empty space weighs something, then that would correspond to the existence of a cosmological term such as Einstein invented. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 932-33  | Added on Wednesday, July 24, 2013, 03:42 PM

For any fourth grader will tell you how much energy is contained in nothing, even if they don’t know what energy is. The answer must be nothing. Alas, most fourth graders have not taken quantum mechanics, nor have they studied relativity. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 972-73  | Added on Wednesday, July 24, 2013, 03:53 PM

Dirac was vindicated, but he also recognized his earlier lack of confidence in his own theory by later saying that his equation was smarter than he was! 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 1379-82  | Added on Monday, July 29, 2013, 03:33 PM

This is so remarkable I want to stress it again. Quantum fluctuations, which otherwise would have been completely invisible, get frozen by inflation and emerge afterward as density fluctuations that produce everything we can see! If we are all stardust, as I have written, it is also true, if inflation happened, that we all, literally, emerged from quantum nothingness. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 105 | Loc. 1460-61  | Added on Monday, July 29, 2013, 04:52 PM

In one sense it is both remarkable and exciting to find ourselves in a universe dominated by nothing. The structures we can see, like stars and galaxies, were all created by quantum fluctuations from nothing. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 106 | Loc. 1471-73  | Added on Monday, July 29, 2013, 05:08 PM

This means that, the longer we wait, the less we will be able to see. Galaxies that we can now see will one day in the future be receding away from us at faster-than-light speed, which means that they will become invisible to us. The light they emit will not be able to make progress against the expansion of space, and it will never again reach us. These galaxies will have disappeared from our horizon. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 1509-11  | Added on Monday, July 29, 2013, 05:10 PM

Indeed, in a strange coincidence, we are living in the only era in the history of the universe when the presence of the dark energy permeating empty space is likely to be detectable. It is true that this era is several hundred billion years long, but in an eternally expanding universe it represents the mere blink of a cosmic eye. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1553-58  | Added on Monday, July 29, 2013, 05:21 PM

It is worth repeating the implications of this remarkable agreement more forcefully: Only in the first seconds of a hot Big Bang, with an initial abundance of protons and neutrons that would result in something very close to the observed density of matter in visible galaxies today, and a density of radiation that would leave a remnant that would correspond precisely to the observed intensity of the cosmic microwave background radiation today, would nuclear reactions occur that could produce precisely the abundance of light elements, hydrogen and deuterium, helium and lithium, that we infer to have comprised the basic building blocks of the stars that now fill the night sky. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 1601-2  | Added on Monday, July 29, 2013, 05:27 PM

Physics is, after all, an empirical science, driven by experiment and observation. Had we not observationally inferred the existence of dark energy, I doubt any theorist would have been bold enough to suggest its existence today. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1614-16  | Added on Monday, July 29, 2013, 05:31 PM

We can consider ourselves lucky that we live at the present time. Or as Bob and I put it in one of the articles we wrote: “We live at a very special time . . . the only time when we can observationally verify that we live at a very special time!” 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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Regardless, the fundamental problem illustrated by the possible future end of cosmology is that we have only one universe to test—the one we live in. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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Before proceeding, however, it is perhaps worth ending with another, more literary picture of the likely future I have presented here and one that is particularly relevant to the subject of this book. It comes from Christopher Hitchens’s response to the scenario I have just described. As he put it, “For those who find it remarkable that we live in a universe of Something, just wait. Nothingness is heading on a collision course right toward us!” 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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We are hardwired to think that everything that happens to us is significant and meaningful. We have a dream that a friend is going to break her arm, and the next day we find out that she sprained her ankle. Wow! Cosmic! Clairvoyant? 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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By forgetting that most of the time nothing of note occurs during the day, we then misread the nature of probability when something unusual does occur: among any sufficiently large number of events, something unusual is bound to happen just by accident. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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Put another way, it is not too surprising to find that we live in a universe in which we can live! 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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Maybe all of the mysteries of particle theory can be solved by invoking the same mantra: if the universe were any other way, we could not live in it. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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We have discovered that 99 percent of the universe is actually invisible to us, comprising dark matter that is most likely some new form of elementary particle, and even more dark energy, whose origin remains a complete mystery at the present time. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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At the same time, in science we have to be particularly cautious about “why” questions. When we ask, “Why?” we usually mean “How?” 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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“Why” implicitly suggests purpose, and when we try to understand the solar system in scientific terms, we do not generally ascribe purpose to it. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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This is what differentiates them from purely theological questions, which generally presume the answers up front. Indeed, I have challenged several theologians to provide evidence contradicting the premise that theology has made no contribution to knowledge in the past five hundred years at least, since the dawn of science. So far no one has provided a counterexample. The most I have ever gotten back was the query, “What do you mean by knowledge?” From an epistemological perspective this may be a thorny issue, but I maintain that, if there were a better alternative, someone would have presented it. Had I presented the same challenge to biologists, or psychologists, or historians, or astronomers, none of them would have been so flummoxed. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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I remind you of the unique facet of a flat universe, at least on scales where it is dominated by matter in the form of galaxies, and where a Newtonian approximation remains valid: in a flat universe, and only in a flat universe, the average Newtonian gravitational energy of every object participating in the expansion is precisely zero. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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This results in the second amazing implication of inflation, that small-density fluctuations in empty space due to the rules of quantum mechanics will later be responsible for all the structure we observe in the universe today. So we, and everything we see, result out of quantum fluctuations in what is essentially nothingness near the beginning of time, namely during the inflationary expansion. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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But no one ever said that the universe is guided by what we, in our petty myopic corners of space and time, might have originally thought was sensible. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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This is the beauty of science, and it should not be threatening. Science simply forces us to revise what is sensible to accommodate the universe, rather than vice versa. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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To summarize then: the observation that the universe is flat and that the local Newtonian gravitational energy is essentially zero today is strongly suggestive that our universe arose though a process like that of inflation, a process whereby the energy of empty space (nothing) gets converted into the energy of something, during a time when the universe is driven closer and closer to being essentially exactly flat on all observable scales. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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Empty space is complicated. It is a boiling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time so short we cannot see them directly. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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Now few biochemists and molecular biologists doubt that life can arise naturally from nonlife, even though the specifics are yet to be discovered. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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Feynman’s methods focus on the key fact to which I alluded at the beginning of this chapter: quantum mechanical systems explore all possible trajectories, even those that are classically forbidden, as they evolve in time. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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But this seems an arbitrary semantic distinction designed by those who have decided in advance (as theologians are wont to do) that the supernatural (i.e., God) must exist so they define their philosophical ideas (once again completely divorced from any empirical basis) to exclude anything but the possibility of a god. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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In a multiverse of any of the types that have been discussed, there could be an infinite number of regions, potentially infinitely big or infinitesimally small, in which there is simply “nothing,” and there could be regions where there is “something.” In this case, the response to why there is something rather than nothing becomes almost trite: there is something simply because if there were nothing, we wouldn’t find ourselves living there! 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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I recognize the frustration inherent in such a trivial response to what has seemed such a profound question throughout the ages. But science has told us that anything profound or trivial can be dramatically different from what we might suppose at first glance. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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The universe is far stranger and far richer—more wondrously strange—than our meager human imaginations can anticipate. Modern cosmology has driven us to consider ideas that could not even have been formulated a century ago. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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This is why philosophy and theology are ultimately incapable of addressing by themselves the truly fundamental questions that perplex us about our existence. Until we open our eyes and let nature call the shots, we are bound to wallow in myopia. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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Alternatively, if the matter that makes us up was created at the beginning of time by some quantum processes, as I have described, we are virtually guaranteed that it, too, will disappear once again. Physics is a two-way street, and beginnings and endings are linked. Far, far into the future, protons and neutrons will decay, matter will disappear, and the universe will approach a state of maximum simplicity and symmetry. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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I have always been attracted to the myth of Sisyphus and have likened the scientific effort at times to his eternal task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to have it fall back each time before he reaches the top. As Camus imagined, Sisyphus was smiling, and so should we. Our journey, whatever the outcome, provides its own reward. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God. Without science, everything is a miracle. With science, there remains the possibility that nothing is. Religious belief in this case becomes less and less necessary, and also less and less relevant. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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The choice to turn to the notion of divine creation falls to each of us, of course, and I don’t expect the ongoing debate to die down anytime soon. But as I have stressed, I believe that if we are to be intellectually honest, we must make an informed choice, informed by fact, not by revelation. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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I find oddly satisfying the possibility that, in either scenario, even a seemingly omnipotent God would have no freedom in the creation of our universe. No doubt because it further suggests that God is unnecessary—or at best redundant. 
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A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (Lawrence Krauss)
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Theologians may speculate about angels on pinheads or whatever is the current equivalent. Physicists might seem to have their own angels and their own pinheads: quanta and quarks, “charm,” “strangeness,” and “spin.” But physicists can count their angels and can get it right to the nearest angel in a total of 10 billion: not an angel more, not an angel less. Science may be weird and incomprehensible—more weird and less comprehensible than any theology—but science works. It gets results. It can fly you to Saturn, slingshotting you around Venus and Jupiter on the way. We may not understand quantum theory (heaven knows, I don’t), but a theory that predicts the real world to ten decimal places cannot in any straightforward sense be wrong. Theology not only lacks decimal places: it lacks even the smallest hint of a connection with the real world. 
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun, but the full implications of Darwin’s revolution have yet to be widely realized.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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This book is mainly intended to be interesting, but if you would extract a moral from it, read it as a warning. Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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germ-plasm’. I shall argue that the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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I shall argue that the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity.*
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is satisfying because it shows us a way in which simplicity could change into complexity, how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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In the lifetime of a man, things that are that improbable can be treated for practical purposes as impossible. That is why you will never win a big prize on the football pools. But in our human estimates of what is probable and what is not, we are not used to dealing in hundreds of millions of years. If you filled in pools coupons every week for a hundred million years you would very likely win several jackpots.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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Can we reconcile the idea that copying errors are an essential prerequisite for evolution to occur, with the statement that natural selection favours high copying-fidelity? The answer is that although evolution may seem, in some vague sense, a ‘good thing’, especially since we are the product of it, nothing actually ‘wants’ to evolve. Evolution is something that happens, willy-nilly, in spite of all the efforts of the replicators (and nowadays of the genes) to prevent it happening.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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Jacques Monod made this point very well in his Herbert Spencer lecture, after wryly remarking: ‘Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it!’
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like ‘living’ does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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This may have been how the first living cells appeared. Replicators began not merely to exist, but to construct for themselves containers, vehicles for their continued existence. The replicators that survived were the ones that built survival machines for themselves to live in.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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In the eye colour example just given, the person would actually have brown eyes: the instructions for making blue eyes would be ignored in the building of the body, though this does not stop them being passed on to future generations. A gene that is ignored in this way is called recessive. The opposite of a recessive gene is a dominant gene. The gene for brown eyes is dominant to the gene for blue eyes. A person has blue eyes only if both copies of the relevant page are unanimous in recommending blue eyes.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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When two genes, like the brown eye and the blue eye gene, are rivals for the same slot on a chromosome, they are called alleles of each other. For our purposes, the word allele is synonymous with rival.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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I have described the normal division of a cell into two new cells, each one receiving a complete copy of all 46 chromosomes. This normal cell division is called mitosis. But there is another kind of cell division called meiosis. This occurs only in the production of the sex cells; the sperms or eggs. Sperms and eggs are unique among our cells in that, instead of containing 46 chromosomes, they contain only 23.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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The process of swapping bits of chromosome is called crossing over.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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Williams.* A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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If we wish, we can define a single gene as a sequence of nucleotide letters lying between a START and an END symbol, and coding for one protein chain. The word cistron has been used for a unit defined in this way, and some people use the word gene interchangeably with cistron.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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The chance coming together, through crossing-over, of previously existing sub-units is the usual way for a new genetic unit to be formed. Another way—of great evolutionary importance even though it is rare—is called point mutation. A point mutation is an error corresponding to a single misprinted letter in a book. It is rare, but clearly the longer a genetic unit is, the more likely it is to be altered by a mutation somewhere along its length.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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Conversely, what are the properties that instantly mark a gene out as a ‘bad’, short-lived one? There might be several such universal properties, but there is one that is particularly relevant to this book: at the gene level, altruism must be bad and selfishness good. This follows inexorably from our definitions of altruism and selfishness. Genes are competing directly with their alleles for survival, since their alleles in the gene pool are rivals for their slot on the chromosomes of future generations. Any gene that behaves in such a way as to increase its own survival chances in the gene pool at the expense of its alleles will, by definition, tautologously, tend to survive. The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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The true ‘purpose’ of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA.*
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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With reservations, the gene pool plays the same role for the modern replicators as the primeval soup did for the original ones. Sex and chromosomal crossing-over have the effect of preserving the liquidity of the modern equivalent of the soup. Because of sex and crossing-over the gene pool is kept well stirred, and the genes partially shuffled. Evolution is the process by which some genes become more numerous and others less numerous in the gene pool.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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As far as the gene is concerned, the gene pool is just the new sort of soup where it makes its living. All that has changed is that nowadays it makes its living by cooperating with successive groups of companions drawn from the gene pool in building one mortal survival machine after another.
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The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft (H.P. Lovecraft)
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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It seems that some people, educationally over-endowed with the tools of philosophy, cannot resist poking in their scholarly apparatus where it isn’t helpful. I am reminded of P. B. Medawar’s remark about the attractions of ‘philosophy-fiction’ to ‘a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought’.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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If simulation is such a good idea, we might expect that survival machines would have discovered it first. After all, they invented many of the other techniques of human engineering long before we came on the scene: the focusing lens and the parabolic reflector, frequency analysis of sound waves, servo-control, sonar, buffer storage of incoming information, and countless others with long names, whose details don’t matter. What about simulation? Well, when you yourself have a difficult decision to make involving unknown quantities in the future, you do go in for a form of simulation. You imagine what would happen if you did each of the alternatives open to you. You set up a model in your head, not of everything in the world, but of the restricted set of entities which you think may be relevant. You may see them vividly in your mind’s eye, or you may see and manipulate stylized abstractions of them. In either case it is unlikely that somewhere laid out in your brain is an actual spatial model of the events you are imagining. But, just as in the computer, the details of how your brain represents its model of the world are less important than the fact that it is able to use it to predict possible events. Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology. There is no reason to suppose that electronic computers are conscious when they simulate, although we have to admit that in the future they may become so. Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.
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The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft (H.P. Lovecraft)
- Highlight Loc. 503-6  | Added on Tuesday, August 06, 2013, 11:13 AM

Could it be that I was face to face with intellectual emanations which would explain the mystery if I could but learn to discover and read them? I did not tell the older physicians of these things, for middle age is sceptical, cynical, and disinclined to accept new ideas. Besides, the head of the institution had but lately warned me in his paternal way that I was overworking; that my mind needed a rest.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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It was this macabre habit, in the related Ichneumon wasps, that provoked Darwin to write: ‘I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars . . .” He might as well have used the example of a French chef boiling lobsters alive to preserve the flavour.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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The general conclusions which are important are that ESS is will tend to evolve, that an ESS is not the same as the optimum that could be achieved by a group conspiracy, and that common sense can be misleading.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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An evolutionarily stable strategy or ESS is defined as a strategy which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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Similarly, the fact that genes are selected for mutual compatibility does not necessarily mean we have to think of groups of genes as being selected as units, as they were in the case of the butterflies. Selection at the low level of the single gene can give the impression of selection at some higher level.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
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The gene pool is the long-term environment of the gene. ‘Good’ genes are blindly selected as those that survive in the gene pool. This is not a theory; it is not even an observed fact: it is a tautology.
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- Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 1937-42  | Added on Tuesday, August 06, 2013, 04:28 PM

As a first approximation I said that what makes a gene good is the ability to build efficient survival machines—bodies. We must now amend that statement. The gene pool will become an evolutionarily stable set of genes, defined as a gene pool that cannot be invaded by any new gene. Most new genes that arise, either by mutation or reassortment or immigration, are quickly penalized by natural selection: the evolutionarily stable set is restored. Occasionally a new gene does succeed in invading the set: it succeeds in spreading through the gene pool. There is a transitional period of instability, terminating in a new evolutionarily stable set—a little bit of evolution has occurred.
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- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 2122-25  | Added on Thursday, August 08, 2013, 10:41 AM

When a man throws a ball high in the air and catches it again, he behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory of the ball. He may neither know nor care what a differential equation is, but this does not affect his skill with the ball. At some subconscious level, something functionally equivalent to the mathematical calculations is going on.
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- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 2403-5  | Added on Friday, August 23, 2013, 06:13 PM

It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
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- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 2497-2500  | Added on Monday, August 26, 2013, 08:41 AM

According to Lack, therefore, individuals regulate their clutch size for reasons that are anything but altruistic. They are not practising birth-control in order to avoid over-exploiting the group’s resources. They are practising birth-control in order to maximize the number of surviving children they actually have, an aim which is the very opposite of that which we normally associate with birth-control.
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- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2520  | Added on Monday, August 26, 2013, 06:18 PM

Contraception is sometimes attacked as ‘unnatural’. So it is, very unnatural. The trouble is, so is the welfare state.
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- Highlight on Page 118 | Loc. 2524-25  | Added on Monday, August 26, 2013, 06:19 PM

Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.
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- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 2603-6  | Added on Tuesday, August 27, 2013, 08:49 AM

Our conclusion from this chapter is that individual parents practise family planning, but in the sense that they optimize their birth-rates rather than restrict them for public good. They try to maximize the number of surviving children that they have, and this means having neither too many babies nor too few. Genes that make an individual have too many babies tend not to persist in the gene pool, because children containing such genes tend not to survive to adulthood.
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- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 2930-32  | Added on Wednesday, September 04, 2013, 08:24 AM

The phrase ‘the child should cheat’ means that genes that tend to make children cheat have an advantage in the gene pool. If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.
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- Highlight on Page 142 | Loc. 2969-72  | Added on Wednesday, September 04, 2013, 08:33 AM

Since each sperm is so tiny, a male can afford to make many millions of them every day. This means he is potentially able to beget a very large number of children in a very short period of time, using different females. This is only possible because each new embryo is endowed with adequate food by the mother in each case. This therefore places a limit on the number of children a female can have, but the number of children a male can have is virtually unlimited. Female exploitation begins here.*
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- Highlight on Page 143 | Loc. 2987-89  | Added on Thursday, September 05, 2013, 08:07 AM

But the selection pressure to lock out exploiters would have been weaker than the pressure on exploiters to duck under the barrier: the exploiters had more to lose, and they therefore won the evolutionary battle. The honest ones became eggs, and the exploiters became sperms.
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- Highlight on Page 143 | Loc. 2989-90  | Added on Thursday, September 05, 2013, 08:09 AM

Males, then, seem to be pretty worthless fellows, and on simple ‘good of the species’ grounds, we might expect that males would become less numerous than females.
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- Highlight on Page 143 | Loc. 2997-99  | Added on Thursday, September 05, 2013, 08:10 AM

The selfish gene theory, on the other hand, has no trouble in explaining the fact that the numbers of males and females tend to be equal, even when the males who actually reproduce may be a small fraction of the total number.
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- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 3049-50  | Added on Friday, September 06, 2013, 07:29 AM

Since she starts by investing more than the male, in the form of her large, food-rich egg, a mother is already at the moment of conception ‘committed’ to each child more deeply than the father is. She stands to lose more if the child dies than the father does.
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- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 3051-53  | Added on Friday, September 06, 2013, 07:30 AM

More to the point, she would have to invest more than the father in the future in order to bring a new substitute child up to the same level of development. If she tried the tactic of leaving the father holding the baby, while she went off with another male, the father might, at relatively small cost to himself, retaliate by abandoning the baby too.
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- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 3112-14  | Added on Monday, September 09, 2013, 08:17 AM

Any male who is not patient enough to wait until the female eventually consents to copulate is not likely to be a good bet as a faithful husband. By insisting on a long engagement period, a female weeds out casual suitors, and only finally copulates with a male who has proved his qualities of fidelity and perseverance in advance.
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- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 3115-16  | Added on Monday, September 09, 2013, 08:18 AM

As we have already seen, a long engagement can also benefit a male where there is a danger of his being duped into caring for another male’s child.
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- Highlight on Page 302 | Loc. 6015-17  | Added on Thursday, September 12, 2013, 08:05 AM

Maynard Smith explores these historical networks in a brief survey of mating patterns throughout the animal kingdom, ending with the memorable rhetorical question: ‘Why don’t male mammals lactate?’
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- Highlight on Page 154 | Loc. 3209-12  | Added on Wednesday, September 18, 2013, 08:04 AM

Any male who can pass himself off as a good loyal domestic type, but who in reality is concealing a strong tendency towards desertion and unfaithfulness, could have a great advantage. As long as his deserted former wives have any chance of bringing up some of the children, the philanderer stands to pass on more genes than a rival male who is an honest husband and father. Genes for effective deception by males will tend to be favoured in the gene pool.
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- Highlight on Page 155 | Loc. 3222-24  | Added on Wednesday, September 18, 2013, 08:08 AM

Natural selection, by sharpening up the ability of each partner to detect dishonesty in the other, has kept large-scale deceit down to a fairly low level. Males have more to gain from dishonesty than females, and we must expect that, even in those species where males show considerable parental altruism, they will usually tend to do a bit less work than the females, and to be a bit more ready to abscond.
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- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 3305-10  | Added on Tuesday, September 24, 2013, 12:20 PM

Now comes the part of Zahavi’s theory that really sticks in the throat. He suggests that the tails of birds of paradise and peacocks, the huge antlers of deer, and the other sexually-selected features which have always seemed paradoxical because they appear to be handicaps to their possessors, evolve precisely because they are handicaps. A male bird with a long and cumbersome tail is showing off to females that he is such a strong he-man that he can survive in spite of his tail. Think of a woman watching two men run a race. If both arrive at the finishing post at the same time, but one has deliberately encumbered himself with a sack of coal on his back, the women will naturally draw the conclusion that the man with the burden is really the faster runner.
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- Highlight on Page 162 | Loc. 3355-59  | Added on Tuesday, September 24, 2013, 12:30 PM

Eggs are a relatively valuable resource, and therefore a female does not need to be so sexually attractive as a male does in order to ensure that her eggs are fertilized. A male is perfectly capable of siring all the children born to a large population of females. Even if a male has a short life because his gaudy tail attracts predators, or gets tangled in the bushes, he may have fathered a very large number of children before he dies. An unattractive or drab male may live even as long as a female, but he has few children, and his genes are not passed on.
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- Highlight on Page 163 | Loc. 3372-73  | Added on Tuesday, September 24, 2013, 02:19 PM

A male, on the other hand, has less to lose if he mates with a member of the wrong species, and, although he may have nothing to gain either, we should expect males to be less fussy in their choice of sexual partners.
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- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 3391-92  | Added on Tuesday, September 24, 2013, 02:23 PM

What this astonishing variety suggests is that man’s way of life is largely determined by culture rather than by 
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- Highlight on Page 169 | Loc. 3461-63  | Added on Wednesday, September 25, 2013, 06:25 PM

Bird alarm calls have been held up so many times as ‘awkward’ for the Darwinian theory that it has become a kind of sport to dream up explanations for them. As a result, we now have so many good explanations that it is hard to remember what all the fuss was about.
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- Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 3526-29  | Added on Wednesday, September 25, 2013, 06:35 PM

Suicidal self-sacrifice therefore seldom evolves. But a worker bee never bears offspring of its own. All its efforts are directed to preserving its genes by caring for relatives other than its own offspring. The death of a single sterile worker bee is no more serious to its genes than is the shedding of a leaf in autumn to the genes of a tree. There is a
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- Bookmark on Page 181 | Loc. 3692  | Added on Wednesday, October 02, 2013, 05:54 PM


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- Highlight on Page 181 | Loc. 3692-97  | Added on Wednesday, October 02, 2013, 05:54 PM

Ants have their own domestic animals as well as their crop plants. Aphids—greenfly and similar bugs—are highly specialized for sucking the juice out of plants. They pump the sap up out of the plants’ veins more efficiently than they subsequently digest it. The result is that they excrete a liquid that has had only some of its nutritious value extracted. Droplets of sugar-rich ‘honeydew’ pass out of the back end at a great rate, in some cases more than the insect’s own body-weight every hour. The honeydew normally rains down on to the ground—it may well have been the providential food known as ‘manna’ in the Old Testament. But ants of several species intercept it as soon as it leaves the bug. The ants ‘milk’ the aphids by stroking their hind-quarters with their feelers and legs.
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- Highlight on Page 181 | Loc. 3709-10  | Added on Wednesday, October 02, 2013, 05:55 PM

A lichen appears superficially to be an individual plant like any other. But it is really an intimate symbiotic union between a fungus and a green alga. Neither partner could live without the other.
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- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 3714-15  | Added on Wednesday, October 02, 2013, 05:56 PM

Recently it has been plausibly argued that mitochondria are, in origin, symbiotic bacteria who joined forces with our type of cell very early in evolution. Similar suggestions have been made for other small bodies within our cells.
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- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 3717  | Added on Thursday, October 03, 2013, 08:26 AM

We are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes.
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- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 3719-22  | Added on Thursday, October 03, 2013, 08:26 AM

Viruses consist of pure DNA (or a related self-replicating molecule) surrounded by a protein jacket. They are all parasitic. The suggestion is that they have evolved from ‘rebel’ genes who escaped, and now travel from body to body directly through the air, rather than via the more conventional vehicles—sperms and eggs. If this is true, we might just as well regard ourselves as colonies of viruses!
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- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 3729-31  | Added on Thursday, October 03, 2013, 08:28 AM

In general, associations of mutual benefit will evolve if each partner can get more out than he puts in. This is true whether we are speaking of members of the same hyena pack, or of widely distinct creatures such as ants and aphids, or bees and flowers.
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- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 3825-26  | Added on Thursday, October 03, 2013, 05:56 PM

It is even possible that man’s swollen brain, and his predisposition to reason mathematically, evolved as a mechanism of ever more devious cheating, and ever more penetrating detection of cheating in others. Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism.
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- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 3873-74  | Added on Monday, October 07, 2013, 08:24 AM

I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
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- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 3881-82  | Added on Monday, October 07, 2013, 08:25 AM

This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.*
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- Highlight on Page 322 | Loc. 6460-65  | Added on Monday, October 07, 2013, 05:56 PM

The first ten chapters of The Selfish Gene had concentrated exclusively on one kind of replicator, the gene. In discussing memes in the final chapter I was trying to make the case for replicators in general, and to show that genes were not the only members of that important class. Whether the milieu of human culture really does have what it takes to get a form of Darwinism going, I am not sure. But in any case that question is subsidiary to my concern. Chapter 11 will have succeeded if the reader closes the book with the feeling that DNA molecules are not the only entities that might form the basis for Darwinian evolution.
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- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 3904-8  | Added on Tuesday, October 08, 2013, 07:45 AM

What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary.
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- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 3921-24  | Added on Tuesday, October 08, 2013, 07:47 AM

The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains, provided the soup’ in which the first memes arose. Once self-copying memes had arisen, their own, much faster, kind of evolution took off. We biologists have assimilated the idea of genetic evolution so deeply that we tend to forget that it is only one of many possible kinds of evolution.
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- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 3942-43  | Added on Tuesday, October 08, 2013, 08:11 AM

The memes are being passed on to you in altered form. This looks quite unlike the particulate, all-or-none quality of gene transmission. It looks as though meme transmission is subject to continuous mutation, and also to blending.
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- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 3957-60  | Added on Tuesday, October 08, 2013, 08:23 AM

Each individual has his own way of interpreting Darwin’s ideas. He probably learned them not from Darwin’s own writings, but from more recent authors. Much of what Darwin said is, in detail, wrong. Darwin if he read this book would scarcely recognize his own original theory in it, though I hope he would like the way I put it. Yet, in spite of all this, there is something, some essence of Darwinism, which is present in the head of every individual who understands the theory.
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- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3985-86  | Added on Tuesday, October 08, 2013, 05:14 PM

The human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of ‘rival’ memes.
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- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3986-87  | Added on Tuesday, October 08, 2013, 05:15 PM

Other commodities for which memes compete are radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper column-inches, and library shelf-space.
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- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3985-87  | Added on Tuesday, October 08, 2013, 05:15 PM

The human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of ‘rival’ memes. Other commodities for which memes compete are radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper column-inches, and library shelf-space.
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- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 4016-21  | Added on Wednesday, October 09, 2013, 08:21 AM

Suppose, for the sake of argument, it happened to be the case that marriage weakened the power of a priest to influence his flock, say because it occupied a large proportion of his time and attention. This has, indeed, been advanced as an official reason for the enforcement of celibacy among priests. If this were the case, it would follow that the meme for celibacy could have greater survival value than the meme for marriage. Of course, exactly the opposite would be true for A gene for celibacy. If a priest is a survival machine for memes, celibacy is a useful attribute to build into him. Celibacy is just a minor partner in a large complex of mutually-assisting religious memes.
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- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 4022-24  | Added on Wednesday, October 09, 2013, 08:22 AM

Selection favours memes that exploit their cultural environment to their own advantage. This cultural environment consists of other memes which are also being selected. The meme pool therefore comes to have the attributes of an evolutionarily stable set, which new memes find it hard to invade.
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- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 4025  | Added on Wednesday, October 09, 2013, 08:22 AM

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and
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- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 4025  | Added on Wednesday, October 09, 2013, 08:22 AM

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes.
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- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 4029-30  | Added on Wednesday, October 09, 2013, 08:23 AM

Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king’s genes. We should not seek immortality in reproduction.
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- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 4032-33  | Added on Wednesday, October 09, 2013, 08:24 AM

Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G. C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The memecomplexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.
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- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 4054-55  | Added on Wednesday, October 09, 2013, 08:26 AM

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination.
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- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 4244-47  | Added on Thursday, October 10, 2013, 12:17 PM

So, we have identified two characteristics of winning strategies: niceness and forgivingness. This almost utopian-sounding conclusion—that niceness and forgivingness pay—came as a surprise to many of the experts, who had tried to be too cunning by submitting subtly nasty strategies; while even those who had submitted nice strategies had not dared anything so forgiving as Tit for Two Tats.
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- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 4256-57  | Added on Thursday, October 10, 2013, 12:29 PM

But once again nastiness didn’t pay. Once again, Tit for Tat, submitted by Anatol Rapoport, was the winner, and it scored a massive 96 per cent of the benchmark score.
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- Highlight on Page 220 | Loc. 4389-92  | Added on Monday, October 14, 2013, 08:29 AM

Sadly, however, when psychologists set up games of Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma between real humans, nearly all players succumb to envy and therefore do relatively poorly in terms of money. It seems that many people, perhaps without even thinking about it, would rather do down the other player than cooperate with the other player to do down the banker.
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- Highlight on Page 224 | Loc. 4458-60  | Added on Monday, October 14, 2013, 04:55 PM

Many situations in real life are, as a matter of fact, equivalent to nonzero sum games. Nature often plays the role of ‘banker’, and individuals can therefore benefit from one another’s success. They do not have to do down rivals in order to benefit themselves.
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- Highlight on Page 228 | Loc. 4547-49  | Added on Tuesday, October 15, 2013, 08:41 AM

We are, of course, entirely familiar with the idea of unconscious strategists, or at least of strategists whose consciousness, if any, is irrelevant. Unconscious strategists abound in the pages of this book. Axelrod’s programs are an exellent model for the way we, throughout the book, have been thinking of animals and plants, and indeed of genes.
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- Highlight on Page 229 | Loc. 4552-55  | Added on Tuesday, October 15, 2013, 08:42 AM

Nobody would ever claim that a bacterium was a conscious strategist, yet bacterial parasites are probably engaged in ceaseless games of Prisoner’s Dilemma with their hosts and there is no reason why we should not attribute Axelrodian adjectives—forgiving, non-envious, and so on—to their strategies.
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- Highlight on Page 229 | Loc. 4560-62  | Added on Tuesday, October 15, 2013, 08:51 AM

Needless to say, there is no suggestion that the bacteria work all this out in their nasty little heads! Selection on generations of bacteria has presumably built into them an unconscious rule of thumb which works by purely biochemical means.
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- Highlight on Page 233 | Loc. 4623-24  | Added on Tuesday, October 15, 2013, 09:23 PM

What the Darwinian corpus gives us is not detailed expectations about particular organisms. It gives us something subtler and more valuable: understanding of principle.
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- Highlight on Page 235 | Loc. 4646-50  | Added on Wednesday, October 16, 2013, 08:38 AM

All genes look alike, just as all recording tapes look alike. The important differences between genes emerge only in their effects. This usually means effects on the processes of embryonic development and hence on bodily form and behaviour. Successful genes are genes that, in the environment influenced by all the other genes in a shared embryo, have beneficial effects on that embryo. Beneficial means that they make the embryo likely to develop into a successful adult, an adult likely to reproduce and pass those very same genes on to future generations.
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- Highlight on Page 235 | Loc. 4652-54  | Added on Wednesday, October 16, 2013, 08:40 AM

Natural selection favours some genes rather than others not because of the nature of the genes themselves, but because of their consequences—their phenotypic effects.
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- Highlight on Page 236 | Loc. 4666-70  | Added on Wednesday, October 16, 2013, 08:44 AM

What if a mutant gene arose that just happened to have an effect, not upon something obvious like eye colour or curliness of hair, but upon meiosis itself? Suppose it happened to bias meiosis in such a way that it, the mutant gene itself, was more likely than its allelic partner to end up in the egg. There are such genes and they are called segregation distorters. They have a diabolical simplicity. When a segregation distorter arises by mutation, it will spread inexorably through the population at the expense of its allele. It is this that is known as meiotic drive.
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- Highlight on Page 238 | Loc. 4704-6  | Added on Wednesday, October 16, 2013, 06:04 PM

The phenotypic effects of a gene are normally seen as all the effects that it has on the body in which it sits. This is the conventional definition. But we shall now see that the phenotypic effects of a gene need to be thought of as all the effects that it has on the world.
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- Highlight on Page 239 | Loc. 4724-26  | Added on Wednesday, October 16, 2013, 06:07 PM

Just imagine the banner headlines if a marine biologist were to discover a species of dolphin that wove large, intricately meshed fishing nets, twenty dolphin-lengths in diameter! Yet we take a spider web for granted, as a nuisance in the house rather than as one of the wonders of the world.
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- Highlight on Page 240 | Loc. 4748-50  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 09:22 AM

All that genes can really influence directly is protein synthesis. A gene’s influence upon a nervous system, or, for that matter, upon the colour of an eye or the wrinkliness of a pea, is always indirect.
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- Highlight on Page 245 | Loc. 4850-52  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:03 AM

Our own genes cooperate with one another, not because they are our own but because they share the same outlet—sperm or egg—into the future. If any genes of an organism, such as a human, could discover a way of spreading themselves that did not depend on the conventional sperm or egg route, they would take it and be less cooperative.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 245 | Loc. 4853-54  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:04 AM

We’ve already seen examples of genes that bias meiosis in their own favour. Perhaps there are also genes that have broken out of the sperm/egg ‘proper channels’ altogether and pioneered a sideways route.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 246 | Loc. 4865-67  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:19 AM

We are losing cells continually from our skin; much of the dust in our houses consists of our sloughed-off cells. We must be breathing in one another’s cells all the time. If you draw your fingernail across the inside of your mouth it will come away with hundreds of living cells. The kisses and caresses of lovers must transfer multitudes of cells both ways.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 246 | Loc. 4857-60  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:19 AM

Some plasmids are capable of splicing themselves seamlessly into a chromosome. So smooth is the splice that you can’t see the join: the plasmid is indistinguishable from any other part of the chromosome. The same plasmids can also cut themselves out again. This ability of DNA to cut and splice, to jump in and out of chromosomes at the drop of a hat, is one of the more exciting facts that have come to light since the first edition of this book was published.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 247 | Loc. 4884  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:26 AM

Or perhaps, as I speculated on page 182, all ‘own’ chromosomal genes should be regarded as mutually parasitic on one another.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 247 | Loc. 4886-89  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:27 AM

An orthodox chromosomal gene and a venereally transmitted virus agree with one another in wanting their host to copulate. It is an intriguing thought that both would want the host to be sexually attractive. More, an orthodox chromosomal gene and a virus that is transmitted inside the host’s egg would agree in wanting the host to succeed not just in its courtship but in every detailed aspect of its life, down to being a loyal, doting parent and even grandparent.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 248 | Loc. 4899-4900  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:30 AM

Beaver lakes are extended phenotypic effects of beaver genes, and they can extend over several hundreds of yards. A long reach indeed!
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 250 | Loc. 4940-41  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:38 AM

The point is summed up in one of Aesop’s fables: ‘The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.’
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 250 | Loc. 4949-51  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:40 AM

We showed that the very idea of an ‘own’ body was a loaded assumption. In one sense, all the genes in a body are ‘parasitic’ genes, whether we like to call them the body’s ‘own’ genes or not.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 252 | Loc. 4982-84  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:44 AM

For ants, matricide is an act of special genetic madness and formidable indeed must be the drug that drives them to it. In the world of the extended phenotype, ask not how an animal’s behaviour benefits its genes; ask instead whose genes it is benefiting. It is hardly surprising that
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 252 | Loc. 4982-83  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:45 AM

For ants, matricide is an act of special genetic madness and formidable indeed must be the drug that drives them to it. In the world of the extended phenotype, ask not how an animal’s behaviour benefits its genes; ask instead whose genes it is benefiting.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 253 | Loc. 4999-5001  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:49 AM

It doesn’t matter in which body a gene physically sits. The target of its manipulation may be the same body or a different one. Natural selection favours those genes that manipulate the world to ensure their own propagation.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 253 | Loc. 5001-3  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:49 AM

This leads to what I have called the Central Theorem of the Extended Phenotype: An animal’s behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes ‘for’that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 254 | Loc. 5012-14  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:52 AM

The vehicles that we know best are individual bodies like our own. A body, then, is not a replicator; it is a vehicle. I must emphasize this, since the point has been misunderstood. Vehicles don’t replicate themselves; they work to propagate their replicators.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 258 | Loc. 5087-89  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 11:22 AM

Nowadays this cooperation between genes goes on within cells. It must have started as rudimentary cooperation between self-replicating molecules in the primeval soup (or whatever primeval medium there was). Cell walls perhaps arose as a device to keep useful chemicals together and stop them leaking away.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 258 | Loc. 5096-98  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 11:23 AM

The advantages of being in a club of cells don’t stop with size. The cells in the club can specialize, each thereby becoming more efficient at performing its particular task. Specialist cells serve other cells in the club and they also benefit from the efficiency of other specialists.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 259 | Loc. 5119-21  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 11:30 AM

The only difference between the two species is that splurgeweed reproduces by hiving off chunks of itself consisting of indeterminate numbers of cells, while bottle-wrack reproduces by hiving off chunks of itself always consisting of single cells.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 260 | Loc. 5137-38  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 11:35 AM

There is only a limited amount of change that can be achieved by direct transformation in the ‘swords to ploughshares’ manner. Really radical change can be achieved only by going ‘back to the drawing board’, throwing away the previous design and starting afresh.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5143-45  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 11:38 AM

Every new organism begins as a single cell and grows anew. It inherits the ideas of ancestral design, in the form of the DNA program, but it does not inherit the physical organs of its ancestors.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5147-48  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 11:38 AM

One important thing about a ‘bottlenecked’ life cycle is that it makes possible the equivalent of going back to the drawing board.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 5162-65  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 11:41 AM

Think of how readily we ourselves use the cycles of the earth’s daily rotation, and its yearly circumnavigation of the sun, to structure and order our lives. In the same way, the endlessly repeated growth rhythms imposed by a bottlenecked life cycle will—it seems almost inevitable—be used to order and structure embryology.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 263 | Loc. 5194-97  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 11:47 AM

We can think of an individual organism as a ‘group’ of cells. A form of group selection can be made to work, provided some means can be found for increasing the ratio of between-group variation to within-group variation. Bottle-wrack’s reproductive habit has exactly the effect of increasing this ratio; splurge-weed’s habit has just the opposite effect.
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The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author (Richard Dawkins)
- Highlight on Page 263 | Loc. 5197-5200  | Added on Thursday, October 17, 2013, 10:25 PM

two other ideas that have dominated this chapter. Firstly the idea that parasites will cooperate with hosts to the extent that their genes pass to the next generation in the same reproductive cells as the genes of the hosts—squeezing through the same bottleneck. And secondly the idea that the cells of a sexually reproducing body cooperate with each other only because meiosis is scrupulously fair.
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Métaphysique Des Tubes (Amélie Nothomb)
- Highlight Loc. 1175-76  | Added on Monday, October 21, 2013, 03:05 PM

A trois ans, l'anxiété est absolue : on remarque tout et on ne comprend rien. Il n'y a aucune jurisprudence mentale à consulter pour s'apaiser.
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Pantagruel (Rabelais)
- Highlight Loc. 1302-8  | Added on Friday, October 25, 2013, 06:15 PM

Je serve23 les prescriptz Décalogicques, et, selon la facultatule24 de mes vires, n'en discède le late unguicule25. Bien est vériforme que, à cause que Mammone ne supergurgite goutte en mes locules26, je suis quelque peu rare et lend à superéroger les éleemosynes27 à ces égènes28 quéritans29 leurs stipe hostiatement30.
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Pantagruel (Rabelais)
- Highlight Loc. 2069-70  | Added on Wednesday, October 30, 2013, 08:17 AM

de Astronomie saiche en tous les canons 47 ; laisse moy l'Astrologie divinatrice, et l'art de Lullius, comme abuz et vanitez
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Pantagruel (Rabelais)
- Highlight Loc. 5816-19  | Added on Thursday, November 21, 2013, 08:58 AM

Puis trouvay une petite bourgade à la dévallée21 ; (j'ay oublié son nom), où je feiz encore meilleure chère que jamais, et gaignay quelque peu d'argent pour vivre. Sçavez-vous comment ? A dormir ; car l'on loue les gens à la journée pour dormir, et gaignent cinq et six solz par jour ; mais ceulx qui ronflent bien fort gaignent bien sept solx et demy22.
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Pantagruel (Rabelais)
- Highlight Loc. 6027-29  | Added on Thursday, November 21, 2013, 12:47 PM

Iceulx fuyez, abhorrissez et haissez autant que je foys, et vous en trouverez bien, sur ma foy, et, si désirez estre bons Pantagruélistes (c'est-à-dire vivre en paix, joye, santé, faisans tousjours grande chère), ne vous fiez jamais en gens qui regardent par un pertuys25.
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Pantagruel (Rabelais)
- Highlight Loc. 6030-33  | Added on Thursday, November 21, 2013, 12:47 PM

Fin des cronicques de Pantagruel, roy des Dipsodes, restituez à leur naturel, avec ses jaictz et prouesses espoventables composez parfeu M. ALCOFRIBAS, abstracteur de quinte essence.
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 1 | Loc. 120-21  | Added on Thursday, November 21, 2013, 06:18 PM

On the one hand is the brain, the most complex object in the known universe, a material thing subject to the laws of physics. On the other hand is the world of awareness, of the sights and sounds of life, of fear and anger, of lust, love, and ennui. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 3 | Loc. 145-47  | Added on Thursday, November 21, 2013, 06:21 PM

In philosophy, the difficulty of explaining why somebody can feel anything is often referred to as the Hard Problem. The term was coined by the philosopher David Chalmers. He made his reputation in the early 1990s by a closely argued chain of reasoning, leading him to conclude that conscious experience does not follow from the physical laws that rule the universe. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 242-43  | Added on Friday, November 22, 2013, 06:17 PM

The ever-increasing complexity of organisms, evident in the fossil record, is a consequence of the unrelenting competition for survival that propels evolution. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 307-9  | Added on Friday, November 22, 2013, 06:26 PM

These two frameworks, one divine and one secular, one for Sunday and one for the rest of the week, did not intersect. The church provided meaning by placing my puny life in the context of the vastness of God’s creation and his Son’s sacrifice for humankind. Science explained facts about the actual universe I found myself in and how it came to be. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 313-14  | Added on Friday, November 22, 2013, 06:26 PM

Humanity is not condemned to wander forever in an epistemological fog, knowing only the surface appearance of things but never their true nature. We can see something; and the longer we gaze, the better we comprehend. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 26 | Loc. 575-76  | Added on Monday, November 25, 2013, 08:43 AM

Many scholars consider this gap between the mechanisms of the brain and the consciousness it exudes to be unbridgeable. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 579-83  | Added on Monday, November 25, 2013, 08:44 AM

Despite the hectoring of deconstructionist, “critical” scholars and sociologists, science remains humanity’s most reliable, cumulative, and objective method for comprehending reality. It is far from fail-safe; it is beset with plenty of erroneous conclusions, setbacks, frauds, power struggles among its practitioners, and other human foibles. But it is far better than any alternative in its ability to understand, predict, and manipulate reality. Because science is so good at figuring out the world around us, it should also help us to explain the world within us. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 594  | Added on Monday, November 25, 2013, 08:46 AM

Qualia are the raw feelings, the elements that make up any one conscious experience. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 601-3  | Added on Monday, November 25, 2013, 08:47 AM

I believe that qualia are properties of the natural world. They do not have a divine or supernatural origin. Rather, they are the consequences of unknown laws that I would like to uncover. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 670-72  | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 08:45 AM

Some scholars deny that consciousness has any causal role. They accept the reality of consciousness but argue that subjective feelings have no function—they are froth on the ocean of existence, without consequence to the world. The technical term is epiphenomenal. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 693-94  | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 08:48 AM

Defining what, exactly, constitutes jazz is notoriously difficult. Hence the saying, “Man, if you gotta ask, you’re never gonna know.” The same holds true for consciousness. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 697-98  | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 08:48 AM

Consider a related but simpler problem: explaining to a person blind from birth what color is. Defining the percept of red is impossible without referring to other red objects. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 709  | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 06:25 PM

A habitual misperception is that science first rigorously defines the phenomena it studies, then uncovers the principles that govern them. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 709-10  | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 06:25 PM

A habitual misperception is that science first rigorously defines the phenomena it studies, then uncovers the principles that govern them. Historically, progress in science is made without precise, axiomatic formulations. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 715-17  | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 06:26 PM

A commonsense definition equates consciousness with our inner, mental life. Consciousness begins when we wake up in the morning and continues throughout the day until we fall into a dreamless sleep. Consciousness is present when we dream but is exiled during deep sleep, anesthesia, and coma. And it is permanently gone in death. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 33 | Loc. 719-20  | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 06:27 PM

A behavioral definition of consciousness is a checklist of actions or behaviors that would certify as conscious any organism that could do one or more of them. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 732-33  | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 06:28 PM

A neuronal definition of consciousness specifies the minimal physiologic mechanisms required for any one conscious sensation. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 34 | Loc. 741-43  | Added on Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 06:30 PM

If these three definitions don’t nail the problem, ask a philosopher. She’ll give you a fourth definition, “consciousness is what it is like to feel something.” 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 752-53  | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2013, 09:24 AM

Although consciousness is fully compatible with the laws of physics, it is not feasible to predict or understand consciousness from these laws alone. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 766-67  | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2013, 09:26 AM

Our brain is big, but other creatures—elephants, dolphins, and whales—have bigger ones. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 776-77  | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2013, 09:28 AM

Homo sapiens is part of an evolutionary continuum, not a unique organism that dropped, fully sentient, from the sky. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 778  | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2013, 09:28 AM

It is possible that consciousness is common to all multicellular animals. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 783  | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2013, 09:29 AM

The repertoire of conscious states must somehow diminish with the diminishing complexity of an organism’s nervous system. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 828-30  | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2013, 06:44 PM

Self-consciousness is part and parcel of consciousness. It is a special form of awareness that is not concerned with the external world, but is directed at internal states, reflections about them, and reflections upon such reflections. This recursiveness makes it a peculiarly powerful mode of thinking. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 840-41  | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2013, 06:45 PM

There is little reason to deny consciousness to animals because they are mute or to premature infants because their brain is not fully developed. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 851-52  | Added on Wednesday, November 27, 2013, 06:46 PM

Emotions are indispensable to a well-balanced and successful life but are not essential for consciousness. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 907  | Added on Thursday, November 28, 2013, 08:51 AM

The question of which brain regions are essential for consciousness is hotly debated. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 54 | Loc. 1149  | Added on Monday, December 02, 2013, 08:16 AM

Consciousness does not arise from regions but from highly networked neurons within and across regions. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 55 | Loc. 1177-78  | Added on Tuesday, December 03, 2013, 08:34 AM

Clearly, the brain can attend to objects it doesn’t see. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 57 | Loc. 1207-8  | Added on Tuesday, December 03, 2013, 08:40 AM

The two-way dissociations I just discussed, attention without consciousness and consciousness without attention, put paid to the notion that the two are the same. They are not. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1372-73  | Added on Wednesday, December 04, 2013, 06:11 PM

Concept cells demonstrate compellingly that the specificity of conscious experience has a direct counterpart at the cellular level. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 1563-67  | Added on Friday, December 06, 2013, 06:11 PM

Suppressing knowledge of the certain doom that awaits us all must have been a major factor in the evolution of what Freud calls defense mechanisms (are we the only animals with them? can a chimp suppress or repress?). These are processes by which the brain removes negative feelings, anxiety, guilt, unbidden thoughts, and so on from consciousness. Without such cleansing mechanisms, early humans might have become too transfixed by their ultimate fate to successfully dominate their niche. Perhaps clinical depression amounts to a loss of such defense mechanisms. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1708-9  | Added on Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 08:53 AM

Your interactions are largely governed by forces beyond your ken, by unconscious desires, motivations, and fears. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1809-10  | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 06:43 PM

Choice blindness is relevant not only to dating but to life in general. You frequently have little idea why you do the things you find yourself doing. Yet the urge to explain is so strong that you make up a story on the spot, justifying your choice, confabulating without realizing it. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1836-38  | Added on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, 06:47 PM

None of the data reviewed here suggests that the unconscious has vast, hitherto untapped powers that can be harnessed to solve your love, family, money, or career problems. Those can only be addressed by thoughtful and disciplined acts and habits cultivated over years, a boring message that few want to hear. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 1880-85  | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 08:49 AM

In a remote corner of the universe, on a small blue planet gravitating around a humdrum sun in the unfashionable, outer districts of the Milky Way, organisms arose from the primordial mud and ooze in an epic struggle for survival that spanned eons. Despite all evidence to the contrary, these bipedal creatures thought of themselves as extraordinarily privileged, as occupying a unique place in a cosmos of a trillion trillion stars. Conceited as they were, they even believed that they, and only they, could escape the iron law of cause and effect that governs everything. They could do this by virtue of something they called free will, which allowed them to do things without any material reason. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1909-12  | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 09:22 PM

Let me start by offering a definition of free will: You are free if, under identical circumstances, you could have acted otherwise. Identical circumstances refer to not only the same external conditions but also the same brain states. This is the strong, libertarian, or Cartesian position, as it was articulated by Descartes, whom we keep encountering. Will with a capital “W,” the real thing. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1921-22  | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 09:24 PM

Street gangs inhabit a parallel universe to the privileged and sheltered one in which my family, friends, colleagues, and I live. These worlds, only miles apart, intersect only rarely. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1930-32  | Added on Thursday, December 12, 2013, 09:25 PM

Yet this Cartesian view of will is the one most regular folks believe in. It is closely linked to the notion of a soul. Hovering above the brain like Nearly Headless Nick, the ghost of Gryffindor House, the soul freely chooses this way or that, making the brain act out its wishes, like the driver who takes a car down this road or that one. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 1967-70  | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 08:35 AM

Compatibilist freedom leaves a residue of unease, a nagging doubt. The absence of overt inner or outer coercion is certainly necessary to be free, but it does not guarantee freedom in the strong sense. If all influences from nature, nurture, and the random factors in your environment are accounted for, is there any room left to maneuver? Aren’t you an utter slave to these constraints? It looks like compatibilism amounts to freedom lite! 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1992-95  | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 08:39 AM

The universe, once set in motion, runs its course inexorably, like a clockwork. To an all-knowing supercomputer, the future is an open book. There is no freedom above and beyond that dictated by the laws of physics. All of your struggles to come to grips with your inner demons, both good and bad, are for naught. The outcome of your future actions was ordained when the universe was wound up at the beginning of time. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 2025-28  | Added on Monday, December 16, 2013, 06:21 PM

The butterfly effect does not invalidate the natural law of cause and effect, however. It continues to reign supreme. Planetary physicists aren’t quite sure where Pluto will be eons from now, but they are confident that its orbit will always be completely in thrall to gravity. What breaks down in chaos is not the chain of action and reaction, but predictability. The universe is still a gigantic clockwork, even though we can’t be sure where the minute and hour hands will point a week hence. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 2066-68  | Added on Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 08:45 AM

According to the inflation theory of cosmology, these superclusters, the largest structures in the cosmos, were caused by stochastic quantum fluctuations that occurred an instant after the Big Bang, which formed the universe. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 2090-92  | Added on Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 08:47 AM

Nervous systems, like anything else, obey the laws of quantum mechanics; yet the collective effect of all these molecules frenetically moving about is to smooth out any quantum indeterminacy, an effect called decoherence. Decoherence implies that the molecules of life can be treated using thoroughly classical, deterministic laws rather than quantum mechanical, probabilistic ones. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 2099-2100  | Added on Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 08:48 AM

Both quantum mechanics and deterministic chaos lead to unpredictable outcomes. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 2116  | Added on Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 08:50 AM

Yet indeterminism provides no solace for the true libertarian; it is no substitute for free will. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 2159-60  | Added on Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 12:54 PM

The only real possibility for libertarian-style free choice is for the mind to realize one quantum mechanical event rather than another, as dictated by Schrödinger’s equation. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 2175-76  | Added on Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 12:56 PM

Laypeople and mystics alike have an inordinate fondness for the hypothesis that the weirdness of quantum mechanics must somehow be responsible for consciousness. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 106 | Loc. 2206-7  | Added on Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 01:07 PM

The brain acts before the mind decides! This was a complete reversal of the deeply held intuition of mental causation—the brain and the body act only after the mind has willed it. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 106 | Loc. 2214-15  | Added on Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 01:09 PM

The timing of the muscle movement and the sensation of willing it more or less coincide, but the actual decision to move occurred earlier, before awareness. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 2223-25  | Added on Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 01:10 PM

This is a neglected idea in the free will debate—that the mind–body nexus creates a specific, conscious sensation of voluntary movement, a compelling experience of “I willed this,” or “I am the author of this action.” 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 2230-31  | Added on Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 01:11 PM

The feeling of agency is no more responsible for the actual decision than thunder for the lightning stroke. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 109 | Loc. 2283-85  | Added on Wednesday, December 18, 2013, 09:00 AM

The feeling of agency is generated by a brain module that assigns authorship to voluntary actions based on simple rules. If you planned to snap your fingers and you look down and see them doing that, the agency module concludes that you initiated the action. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 2323  | Added on Wednesday, December 18, 2013, 09:05 AM

Why you choose the way you do is largely opaque to you. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 2382-85  | Added on Thursday, December 19, 2013, 09:55 AM

I believe that information theory, properly formulated and refined, is capable of such an enormous feat, analyzing the neuronal wiring diagram of any living creature and predicting the form of consciousness that that organism will experience. It can draw up blueprints for the design of conscious artifacts. And, surprisingly, it provides a grandiose view of the evolution of consciousness in the universe. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 2404-5  | Added on Thursday, December 19, 2013, 06:37 PM

This cornucopia of behavior and the numerous structural and molecular similarities between the canine and the human brain lead me to conclude that dogs have phenomenal feelings. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 2404-5  | Added on Thursday, December 19, 2013, 06:37 PM

This cornucopia of behavior and the numerous structural and molecular similarities between the canine and the human brain lead me to conclude that dogs have phenomenal feelings. Any philosophy or theology that denies sentience to them is seriously deficient. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2432-33  | Added on Thursday, December 19, 2013, 06:40 PM

In this yet-to-be-defined manner, consciousness is not manifest when a handful of neurons are wired together; it emerges out of large networks of cells. The bigger those assemblies, the larger the repertoire of conscious states available to the network. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 2472  | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 09:11 AM

Subjectivity is too radically different from anything physical for it to be an emergent phenomenon. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 2486-87  | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 09:13 AM

I believe that consciousness is a fundamental, an elementary, property of living matter. It can’t be derived from anything else; it is a simple substance, in Leibniz’s words. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 2498-2500  | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 05:39 PM

Human consciousness is much more rarified than canine consciousness because the human brain has twenty times more neurons than the brain of a dog and is more heavily networked. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 2507-8  | Added on Friday, December 20, 2013, 05:40 PM

Functionalism applied to consciousness means that any system whose internal structure is functionally equivalent to that of the human brain possesses the same mind. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 2683-84  | Added on Saturday, December 28, 2013, 07:38 PM

Φ denotes the size of the conscious repertoire associated with any network of causally interacting parts. The more integrated and differentiated the system is, the more conscious it is. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 131 | Loc. 2735-37  | Added on Saturday, December 28, 2013, 08:09 PM

The theory can be used to build a consciousness-meter. This gadget takes the wiring diagram of any system of interacting components, be it wet biological circuits or those etched in silicon, to assesses the size of that system’s conscious repertoire. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 2764-65  | Added on Monday, January 06, 2014, 08:43 AM

By postulating that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, rather than emerging out of simpler elements, integrated information theory is an elaborate version of panpsychism. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 2796-98  | Added on Monday, January 06, 2014, 08:49 AM

Teilhard de Chardin believed that the entire cosmos evolves toward what he terms the Omega point, when the universe becomes aware of itself by maximizing its complexity, its synergy. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 2813-15  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 08:25 AM

Despite the naysayers, science will ultimately understand consciousness by combining empirical and clinical studies with mathematical theories and, increasingly, the engineering of conscious artifacts. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2830  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 08:27 AM

Eristic philosophical debates are enjoyable and can even be helpful but they don’t resolve the fundamental issues. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2832-34  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 08:28 AM

For now, I ignore niggling debates about the exact definition of consciousness, whether it is an epiphenomenon, helpless to influence the world, or whether my gut is conscious but not telling me so. These issues will eventually all need to be addressed, but worrying about them today will only impede progress. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 3099-3100  | Added on Wednesday, January 08, 2014, 10:53 AM

If I have learned anything in my lifelong exploration of the mind–body nexus, it is this: Whatever consciousness is—however it relates to the brain—dogs, birds, and legions of other species have it. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 3107-8  | Added on Wednesday, January 08, 2014, 10:54 AM

It is easy to see causality flowing from the brain to the mind, but the reverse is difficult. Any mind-to-brain communication has to be compatible with natural laws, in particular with the principle of energy conservation. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 152 | Loc. 3113-15  | Added on Wednesday, January 08, 2014, 10:55 AM

If we honestly seek a single, rational, and intellectually consistent view of the cosmos and everything in it, we must abandon the classical view of the immortal soul. It is a view that is deeply embedded in our culture; it suffuses our songs, novels, movies, great buildings, public discourse, and our myths. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 152 | Loc. 3115-17  | Added on Wednesday, January 08, 2014, 10:58 AM

Science has brought us to the end of our childhood. Growing up is unsettling to many people, and unbearable to a few, but we must learn to see the world as it is and not as we want it to be. Once we free ourselves of magical thinking we have a chance of comprehending how we fit into this unfolding universe. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 152 | Loc. 3118-20  | Added on Wednesday, January 08, 2014, 10:59 AM

The dominant intellectual position of our day and age is physicalism—at rock bottom all is reducible to physics. There is no need to appeal to anything but space, time, matter, and energy. Physicalism—a halftone away from materialism—is attractive because of its metaphysical sparseness. It makes no additional assumptions. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 152 | Loc. 3122-24  | Added on Wednesday, January 08, 2014, 11:00 AM

This book makes the argument that physicalism by itself is too impoverished to explain the origin of mind. In the previous chapter, I sketched an alternative account that augments physicalism. It is a form of property dualism: The theory of integrated information postulates that conscious, phenomenal experience is distinct from its underlying physical carrier. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 153 | Loc. 3134-35  | Added on Wednesday, January 08, 2014, 11:01 AM

But without some carrier, some mechanism, integrated information can’t exist. Put succinctly: no matter, never mind. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 3261-62  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 08:27 AM

I continue to be amazed by the ability of highly educated and intelligent people to fool themselves. You and I are convinced that our motives are noble, that we are smarter than most, that the opposite sex finds us attractive. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 3274-76  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 06:50 PM

The books of the Bible were written before the true age and extent of the cosmos were even remotely imagined, before the evolutionary bonds between humans and animals were understood, before the brain was identified as the seat of the mind (neither the Old nor the New Testament mentions the brain a single time). 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 3281-82  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 06:56 PM

For many years I, like the vast majority of people, believed what my parents believed. But that is not a truly informed choice. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 161 | Loc. 3320-21  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 09:12 AM

One night, my unconscious rebelled. I woke up, and abstract knowledge had turned to gut-wrenching certainty: I was actually going to die! 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 3385-88  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 09:21 AM

What I took from my readings is that I am less free than I feel I am. Myriad events and predispositions influence me. Yet I can’t hide behind biological urges or anonymous social forces. I must act as if “I” am fully responsible, for otherwise all meaning would be leached from this word and from the notions of good and bad actions. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 3392-93  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 09:22 AM

This is a perhaps overenthusiastic expression of my position on the question of free will: For better or worse, I am the principal actor of my life. 
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Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Christof Koch)
- Highlight on Page 166 | Loc. 3421-24  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:30 PM

I am saddened by the loss of my religious belief, like leaving forever the comfort of my childhood home, suffused with a warm glow and fond memories. I still have feelings of awe when entering a high-vaulted cathedral or listening to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Nor can I escape the emotional thrall, the splendor and pageantry, of high Mass. But my loss of faith is an inescapable part of growing up, of maturing and seeing the world as it is. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 146-47  | Added on Monday, January 13, 2014, 08:49 AM

People don’t procrastinate just to be ornery or because they’re irrational. They procrastinate because it makes sense, given how vulnerable they feel to criticism, failure, and their own perfectionism. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 170  | Added on Monday, January 13, 2014, 08:52 AM

Procrastination is a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 307-10  | Added on Wednesday, January 15, 2014, 08:55 AM

One explanation is offered by Denis Waitley, the author of The Psychology of Winning and The Joy of Working , who defines procrastination as “a neurotic form of self-defensive behavior” aimed at protecting one’s self-worth. That is, we procrastinate when we fear a threat to our sense of worth and independence. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 323-26  | Added on Wednesday, January 15, 2014, 08:57 AM

The fear of judgment is the key fear that stems from over-identifying who you are, your worth as a person, with your work. From this fear follows the counterproductive drive toward perfectionism, severe self-criticism, and the fear that you must deprive yourself of leisure time in order to satisfy some unseen judge. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 431-34  | Added on Thursday, January 16, 2014, 08:54 AM

Procrastination reduces tension by taking us away from something we view as painful or threatening. The more painful work is for you, the more you will try to seek relief through avoidance or through involvement in more pleasurable activities. The more you feel that endless work deprives you of the pleasure of leisure time, the more you will avoid work. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 454-55  | Added on Thursday, January 16, 2014, 08:58 AM

If you believe that a judgment of your work is a judgment of yourself, then perfectionism, self-criticism, and procrastination are necessary forms of protection. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 459-61  | Added on Thursday, January 16, 2014, 08:59 AM

Perfectionistic demands lead to → fear of failure → PROCRASTINATION → self-criticism → anxiety and depression → loss of confidence → greater fear of failure which leads to → stronger need to use PROCRASTINATION as a temporary escape. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 480-81  | Added on Thursday, January 16, 2014, 09:01 AM

If you are in a one-down position—a student, a subordinate, a private in the army—procrastination may be the safest way to exercise some power and control over your life. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 515  | Added on Friday, January 17, 2014, 08:21 AM

Perfectionism and self-criticism are, in fact, the chief causes of fear of failure. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 772-73  | Added on Thursday, January 23, 2014, 08:56 AM

The first major step out of procrastination is to become aware of how fear leads to your old patterns and how creating safety leads to productivity. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 803-4  | Added on Thursday, January 23, 2014, 09:01 AM

In most cases you are the one who confuses just doing the job with testing your worth, where one possible mistake would feel like the end of the world. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 830-31  | Added on Thursday, January 23, 2014, 09:04 AM

Procrastination and Anxiety Work in Five Stages 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 831-32  | Added on Thursday, January 23, 2014, 09:04 AM

First, you give a task or a goal the power to determine your worth and happiness. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 837-38  | Added on Monday, January 27, 2014, 08:45 AM

Second, you use perfectionism to raise the task 100 feet above the ground, so that any mistakes would be tantamount to death, and any failure or rejection would be intolerable. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 844-45  | Added on Monday, January 27, 2014, 08:46 AM

Third, you find yourself frozen with anxiety as your natural stress response produces adrenaline to deal with threats to your survival. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 849-50  | Added on Monday, January 27, 2014, 08:47 AM

Fourth, you then use procrastination to escape your dilemma, which brings the deadline closer, creating time pressure, a higher level of anxiety, and a more immediate and frightening threat than even your fear of failure or of criticism for imperfect work. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 853-54  | Added on Monday, January 27, 2014, 08:47 AM

Fifth and last stage, you then use a real threat, such as a fire or a deadline, to release yourself from perfectionism and to act as a motivator . 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 913-15  | Added on Monday, January 27, 2014, 08:54 AM

While it is common practice to try to motivate ourselves with statements such as “I have to do it” or “I should do it,” such statements loudly communicate to the mind, “I don’t want to do it, but I must force myself to do it for them.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 943-46  | Added on Wednesday, January 29, 2014, 08:54 AM

And your body, being a faithful servant, reacts to this “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” message with either the stress response (by providing high energy for “fight or flight”) or the depressive response (by conserving energy for survival). But your energy can’t go in two directions at once, nor can your mind focus on two problems. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1078-81  | Added on Friday, January 31, 2014, 09:00 AM

Since you have made a mature commitment to the task, rather than arguing against it, you might as well be self-nurturing enough to make it as pleasant as possible. Even when the choices are rotten ones, you can exercise your power of choice and learn to embrace the path that makes the most sense to you. And precisely because you have chosen to do it, it becomes less difficult, less painful, and more quickly accomplished. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1081-83  | Added on Friday, January 31, 2014, 09:00 AM

Whenever you catch yourself losing motivation on a project, look for the implicit “have to” in your thinking and make a decision at that moment to embrace the path—as it is, not the way you think it should be—or let go of it. It’s your choice. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1108  | Added on Friday, January 31, 2014, 09:04 AM

FIVE SELF-STATEMENTS THAT DISTINGUISH PROCRASTINATORS FROM PRODUCERS 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1113  | Added on Friday, January 31, 2014, 09:04 AM

1. Negative Thinking of “I have to.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1117-18  | Added on Friday, January 31, 2014, 09:04 AM

Replace “I have to” with “I choose to.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1128-29  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 07:08 PM

Replace “I must finish” with “When can I start?” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1141-42  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 07:11 PM

Replace “This project is so big and important” with “I can take one small step.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1158-59  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 07:15 PM

Replace “I must be perfect” with “I can be perfectly human.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1161-62  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 07:16 PM

You need self-compassion rather than self-criticism to support your courageous efforts at facing the unavoidable risks of doing real, imperfect work rather than dreaming of the perfect, completed project. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1174-75  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 07:17 PM

Replace “I don’t have time to play” with “I must take time to play.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1185  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 07:18 PM

“I choose to start on one small step, knowing I have plenty of time for play.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1475-76  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 11:29 PM

The three major fears that block action and create procrastination are the terror of being overwhelmed, the fear of failure, and the fear of not finishing. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1645-46  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 08:54 AM

1. What is the worst that could happen? 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1647  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 08:54 AM

2. What would I do if the worst really happened? 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1651  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 08:54 AM

3. How would I lessen the pain and get on with as much happiness as possible if the worst did occur? 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1656  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 08:55 AM

4. What alternatives would I have? 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1659-60  | Added on Tuesday, February 04, 2014, 08:49 AM

5. What can I do now to lessen the probability of this dreaded event occurring? 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1663  | Added on Tuesday, February 04, 2014, 08:49 AM

6. Is there anything I can do now to increase my chances of achieving my goal? 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1718-19  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 08:56 AM

Prepare Challenges to Negative Statements and Attitudes 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1719-20  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 08:57 AM

1. “I need to do more preparation before I can start.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1731  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 08:58 AM

2. “At this rate I’ll never finish.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1738  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 08:59 AM

3. “I should have started earlier.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1744  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 09:00 AM

4. “There’s only more work after this.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1751  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 09:01 AM

5. “It’s not working.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1757-58  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 09:02 AM

6. “I only need a little more time.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1773-75  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 09:04 AM

Use tools such as three-dimensional thinking, the work of worrying, and persistent starting to prepare yourself to deal with anticipated criticism and necessary corrections, but get your work out there—out of the fantasy stage and into the real world. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1779-80  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 09:05 AM

Keep on starting, and finishing will take care of itself. When you’re afraid of finishing, keep asking, “When can I start?” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1788-89  | Added on Saturday, February 08, 2014, 06:26 PM

Neither procrastination nor playing will take away your anxiety when there is something difficult to face. The only thing that really helps is to start working. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1795-96  | Added on Saturday, February 08, 2014, 06:26 PM

The Unschedule asks you to aim at starting for just thirty minutes. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1801-2  | Added on Saturday, February 08, 2014, 06:27 PM

The important thing is that you got started. When you’ve overcome inertia, you’ve gotten yourself beyond the most difficult part. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1863-71  | Added on Monday, February 10, 2014, 08:49 AM

The Unschedule and the guilt-free play system help you to put more time into your leisure and more quality into your work. It tells you to make sure you’ve scheduled enough time for high-quality, guilt-free play. It says: • Do not work more than twenty hours a week on this project. • Do not work more than five hours a day on this project. • You must exercise, play, or dance at least one hour a day. • You must take at least one day a week off from any work. • Aim for starting on thirty minutes of quality work. • Work for an imperfect, perfectly human first effort. • Start small. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1917-22  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 08:56 AM

1. Schedule only: • previously committed time such as meals, sleep, meetings • free time, recreation, leisure reading • socializing, lunches and dinners with friends • health activities such as swimming, running, tennis, working out at the gym • routine structured events such as commuting time, classes, medical appointments 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1929-30  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 08:57 AM

2. Fill in your Unschedule with work on projects only after you have completed at least one-half hour. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1933-34  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 08:57 AM

3. Take credit only for periods of work that represent at least thirty minutes of uninterrupted work. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1938-39  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 08:58 AM

4. Reward yourself with a break or a change to a more enjoyable task after each period worked. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1942  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 08:58 AM

5. Keep track of the number of quality hours worked each day and each week. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1945-46  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 08:59 AM

6. Always leave at least one full day a week for recreation and any small chores you wish to take care of. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1951-52  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 09:01 AM

7. Before deciding to go to a recreational activity or social commitment, take time out for just thirty minutes of work on your project. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1959  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 09:02 AM

8. Focus on starting. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1961-62  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 09:02 AM

9. Think small. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1962-63  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 09:02 AM

Aim for thirty minutes of quality, focused work. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1963  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 09:02 AM

10. Keep starting. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1965-66  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 09:03 AM

If you must worry, worry about starting. In order to finish, all you have to do is to just keep starting! 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 1966-67  | Added on Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 09:03 AM

11. Never end “down.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2023  | Added on Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 08:49 AM

You’re probably busier than you thought. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2027  | Added on Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 08:49 AM

Certain days are less productive than others. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2031  | Added on Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 08:50 AM

Other days are so busy that you need to lower your expectations about getting started on a big project. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2035-36  | Added on Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 08:50 AM

Even a half-hour of work on your project is enough to maintain momentum and avoid the extra burden of having to overcome inertia tomorrow. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2058-59  | Added on Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 08:53 AM

Using the Unschedule provides five major benefits that lead to greater enjoyment of guiltfree play and overcoming procrastination. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2060  | Added on Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 08:53 AM

1. Realistic timekeeping. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2063-64  | Added on Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 08:54 AM

2. Thirty minutes of quality time. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2069  | Added on Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 08:55 AM

3. Experiencing success. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2060-61  | Added on Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 08:56 AM

1. Realistic timekeeping. By first recording all your committed time—such as sleep, meals, exercise, classes, meetings, laundry, and reading—you become acutely aware of how much time is really left for working on your stated goals. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2063-65  | Added on Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 08:56 AM

2. Thirty minutes of quality time. By aiming at starting (rather than finishing) for just thirty minutes, there is a greater likelihood that you won’t feel overwhelmed. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2069-70  | Added on Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 08:57 AM

3. Experiencing success. By recording time worked, you see your progress rather than your failure to meet an unrealistic schedule. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2072-73  | Added on Wednesday, February 12, 2014, 08:57 AM

4. Self-imposed deadlines. Deadlines often create a certain amount of productive pressure, but they’re usually too late to allow for quality work. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2079-81  | Added on Thursday, February 13, 2014, 08:52 AM

5. Newfound “free time.” One of the many fringe benefits of pre-scheduling your leisure activities is that, when one of them is canceled, you can suddenly find yourself thinking with relief, “I have free time; I can work.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2174-75  | Added on Thursday, February 13, 2014, 09:04 AM

Focusing is a two-minute procedure for shifting rapidly to the flow state by replacing guilt and stress with a stress-free focus on the present. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2207-8  | Added on Thursday, February 13, 2014, 09:07 AM

Letting go of the past. With your next three slow, deep breaths, tell yourself to let go of all thoughts and images about work from the past. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2212-13  | Added on Friday, February 14, 2014, 08:15 AM

Letting go of the future. And with your next three slow, deep breaths, let go of what you anticipate happening in the “future”—a constructed concept of a time that really doesn’t exist. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2216-17  | Added on Friday, February 14, 2014, 08:15 AM

Centering in the present. With your next three slow, deep breaths, notice—just notice—that it really doesn’t take much energy to just be in the present. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2419-20  | Added on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 09:01 AM

As management consultant Michael Durst says, “You may not be responsible for causing what happens to you, but you are responsible for what you do to correct it.” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2420-21  | Added on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 09:02 AM

This powerful message contains a crucial concept that many people miss: let go of worrying about the initial cause of the problem so that you can direct your energies to where they can do the most good—on the solution. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2433-34  | Added on Tuesday, February 18, 2014, 09:03 AM

Sticking with the mission while adjusting to negative feedback is an essential skill in the repertoire of the long-term performer. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2528-29  | Added on Wednesday, February 19, 2014, 08:56 AM

Dr. Martha Maxwell, in her book Improving Student Learning Skills, tells us that there are at least five types of distractions: 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2530  | Added on Wednesday, February 19, 2014, 08:56 AM

1. Strong Emotions. This is the one type of distraction that deserves your immediate attention. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2535-36  | Added on Wednesday, February 19, 2014, 08:57 AM

2. Warnings of Danger. Real or imagined threats will interrupt your ability to concentrate by stimulating an adrenaline reaction. To 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2535-36  | Added on Wednesday, February 19, 2014, 08:57 AM

2. Warnings of Danger. Real or imagined threats will interrupt your ability to concentrate by stimulating an adrenaline reaction. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2539-41  | Added on Wednesday, February 19, 2014, 08:58 AM

3. “To-Do” Reminders. While you’re immersed in a difficult project, that quart of milk you have to buy or some other “to-do list” item will suddenly haunt you for no apparent reason. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2544-45  | Added on Wednesday, February 19, 2014, 08:58 AM

4. Escape Fantasies. If you anticipate long periods of deprivation, you can expect an increase in fantasies about food, sex, and vacations. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2547-49  | Added on Wednesday, February 19, 2014, 08:59 AM

5. UFOs—Unidentified Flights of Originality. Creative and often seductive thoughts that cannot be fathomed at this time may fly through your mind while you are working on a project. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2623-24  | Added on Thursday, February 20, 2014, 09:05 AM

Remember, you are the master of your goals; don’t let unrealistic goals be used as an occasion for self-criticism and for lapsing into identifying yourself as a procrastinator. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2631-32  | Added on Thursday, February 20, 2014, 09:06 AM

These three steps will apply Now Habit techniques to the task of setting goals effectively. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2633  | Added on Thursday, February 20, 2014, 09:06 AM

Step 1: Recognize the work of procrastinating. Let go of the fantasy that you can escape work by procrastinating. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2635-36  | Added on Thursday, February 20, 2014, 09:06 AM

The choice is not working or not working, but which type of work; even feeling guilty because of procrastinating takes some effort. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2635-37  | Added on Thursday, February 20, 2014, 09:06 AM

The choice is not working or not working, but which type of work; even feeling guilty because of procrastinating takes some effort. When you commit to a goal, you’re committing to a form of work that brings ongoing rewards. When you procrastinate, you’re choosing a self-punishing form of work. 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2640-41  | Added on Thursday, February 20, 2014, 09:07 AM

Step 2: Freely choose the entire goal. State your goal in the form of a choice or decision: “I freely choose to work on . . .” or “I will work on . . .” 
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The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play (Neil Fiore)
- Highlight Loc. 2657  | Added on Friday, February 21, 2014, 08:48 AM

Step 3: Create functional, observable goals. Vague goals must be translated into something tangible you can do. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight Loc. 101-3  | Added on Sunday, February 23, 2014, 12:51 PM

Mounting evidence in neuroscience and psychology requires the abandonment of many traditional ideas about the soul, free will, and immortality. For many people, such a transition is fraught with pain, but I will try to show how life can have meaning and value within the framework that I call neural naturalism. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 140-41  | Added on Sunday, February 23, 2014, 12:54 PM

The eminent clinical psychologist Martin Seligman remarked that the three great realms of life are love, work, and play. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 154-57  | Added on Sunday, February 23, 2014, 12:56 PM

Thus an answer to Camus' philosophical question about the meaning of life becomes tied to scientific findings, which many philosophers and religious thinkers would consider cheating. They think that philosophy should be concerned with truths that are eternal and absolute, not with the messy and sometimes transient findings of empirical science. Unfortunately, philosophy has been no more successful at finding such eternal truths than religion has been. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 3 | Loc. 168-69  | Added on Sunday, February 23, 2014, 12:58 PM

Rather, we should think of wisdom as knowledge about what matters, why it matters, and how to achieve it. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 176  | Added on Sunday, February 23, 2014, 02:38 PM

Finding coherence among work, love, and play is key to finding satisfaction and happiness in middle age. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 197-98  | Added on Sunday, February 23, 2014, 02:56 PM

The approach to philosophy that I favor, attempting to answer fundamental questions by relating them to scientific findings, is called naturalism. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 5 | Loc. 201-2  | Added on Sunday, February 23, 2014, 03:01 PM

despite thousands of years of trying, no one has managed to find any undisputed a priori truths. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 210-12  | Added on Sunday, February 23, 2014, 03:02 PM

Philosophical naturalism is more intellectually ambitious than conceptual clarification, but rejects Platonic and religious ambitions to seek truth in supernatural realms. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 251-54  | Added on Sunday, February 23, 2014, 03:11 PM

Tying reality to the results of scientific investigations does not in itself rule out spiritual entities such as gods, souls, and angels, for there could be observations and experimental results that are best explained by theories postulating the existence of such entities. Historically, however, the development of naturalistic explanations in terms of physics, biology, and other sciences has rendered supernatural explanations dispensable. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 257-58  | Added on Sunday, February 23, 2014, 03:12 PM

Reality is what science can discover. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 315-17  | Added on Monday, February 24, 2014, 08:46 AM

Plato said that philosophy begins in wonder, but he was only partly right. For many thinkers such as Camus, philosophy begins in anxiety, the intense and hard-to-overcome feeling that life may be meaningless, absurd, irrational, futile, and lacking in morality. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 321-22  | Added on Monday, February 24, 2014, 08:47 AM

Hence it is unsurprising that the Brain Revolution encounters opposition from those who fear its practical as well as its intellectual consequences. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 337-39  | Added on Monday, February 24, 2014, 08:50 AM

the tradition of a priori reasoning in philosophy is not usually allied with religious faith, I will argue that its reliance on intuitions and neglect of evidence is similar to faith-based thinking. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 359-60  | Added on Tuesday, February 25, 2014, 08:46 AM

According to the Website adherents.com , 84 percent of the more than 6 billion people in the world today support some religious group. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 378  | Added on Tuesday, February 25, 2014, 08:49 AM

Religious faiths cannot all be right, but they can all be wrong. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 378-79  | Added on Tuesday, February 25, 2014, 08:49 AM

For most people, the religious faith that they acquire is an accident of birth. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 395-97  | Added on Wednesday, February 26, 2014, 01:15 PM

Religious faith meshes with tendencies in human thinking that are very natural even though they often lead to errors. One is confirmation bias, which is the tendency to notice only examples that support our beliefs while ignoring evidence that conflicts with it. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 399-402  | Added on Wednesday, February 26, 2014, 01:16 PM

An even more powerful kind of support for religious beliefs is motivated inference, which is the tendency to use memory and evidence selectively in order to arrive at beliefs that facilitate our goals. Belief in God can enable people to feel better about many things they desire, such as immortality, divine love, freedom, personal success, and the group identity and social support of their religious community. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 410-11  | Added on Wednesday, February 26, 2014, 01:19 PM

Your lived experience may tell you that your life is full because of a caring God, but in the past people have felt just as strongly that the earth is flat, that the sun revolves around it, and that earthquakes are divine punishments. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 411-12  | Added on Wednesday, February 26, 2014, 01:19 PM

The third serious problem of religious faith is that there have been many cases where actions based on it have turned out to be evil. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 447-48  | Added on Wednesday, February 26, 2014, 01:22 PM

Faithbased thinking provides no basis for resolving disagreements by changing minds, but evidence-based thinking does. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 504-7  | Added on Thursday, February 27, 2014, 08:59 AM

The view that the dinosaur's demise was primarily the result of the collision of a massive asteroid with the earth is currently accepted because it explains such facts as why the fossil occurrence of dinosaurs stops at a level of sediment that contains the element iridium, which is commonly found in asteroids. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 23 | Loc. 502-3  | Added on Thursday, February 27, 2014, 08:59 AM

In physics, the acceptance of Newton's theory of gravitation, Einstein's theory of relativity, and quantum theory can all be understood as instances of inference to the best explanation. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 496-97  | Added on Thursday, February 27, 2014, 09:00 AM

Choosing the best explanation requires not just counting the pieces of evidence explained, but also evaluating which of the competing hypotheses have most overall coherence with all the available information. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 24 | Loc. 531-32  | Added on Thursday, February 27, 2014, 09:03 AM

Science is recognized as approximate and fallible, allowing for the development of new and better theories rather than the dogmatic maintenance of orthodoxies. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 532-34  | Added on Monday, March 03, 2014, 08:42 AM

Fourth, scientists are trained not to focus on just those observations that fit with their biases, but rather to conduct systematic observations that collect broad and representative samples of relevant data. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 535-36  | Added on Monday, March 03, 2014, 08:42 AM

Fifth, whereas ordinary people gain evidence only from their senses such as sight, scientists use instruments to observe things and events that are out of reach of direct sense experience. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 538-39  | Added on Monday, March 03, 2014, 08:42 AM

The sixth and probably most important way in which evidence-based inference in science differs from everyday life is the use of experiments. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 571-72  | Added on Tuesday, March 04, 2014, 11:13 AM

Positivism is the philosophical view that such leaps are illegitimate, that science should stick to what can be observed with the senses. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 571-72  | Added on Tuesday, March 04, 2014, 11:13 AM

Positivism is the philosophical view that such leaps are illegitimate, that science should stick to what can be observed with the senses. But why should observation be restricted to what the human senses, with their particular evolutionary limitations, can perform? 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 581-83  | Added on Tuesday, March 04, 2014, 11:16 AM

In sum, the scientific use of evidence is radically different from and more effective than religious faith. Science uses explanations that are mechanistic and mathematical, observations that are systematic and made by instruments more powerful than human senses, and experiments that generate evidence acutely relevant to the choice of the best explanatory hypotheses. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 27 | Loc. 585-86  | Added on Tuesday, March 04, 2014, 11:17 AM

When I first heard of the movement for evidence-based medicine, my initial reaction was: what, there's another kind? 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 629-33  | Added on Tuesday, March 04, 2014, 11:48 AM

Many people, including even some doctors, have only a weak understanding of the rationale of evidence-based medicine. Some doctors continue to espouse the advantages of “clinical experience,” which may indeed sometimes be a source of reliable observations about effective treatments for diseases. But it is very difficult to separate the reliable from the anecdotal or spurious, given that doctors are prone to cognitive and emotional biases just like other people. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 657-59  | Added on Tuesday, March 04, 2014, 11:54 AM

The fact that inference to the best explanation of evidence can go astray is no reason to reject it, as long as it often gets things right and there is no alternative method that has a better record of achieving important truths and avoiding errors. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 37 | Loc. 745-46  | Added on Wednesday, March 05, 2014, 05:08 PM

A priori reasoning based on what is conceivable is not the same as faith, in that it does rely on arguments rather than on blind trust in a deity, leader, or text. But it has the same arbitrary nature as faith. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 777-78  | Added on Thursday, March 06, 2014, 08:56 AM

Once again, what we can conceive or imagine depends on what else we believe, not on some absolute direct access to what has to be true. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 782-85  | Added on Thursday, March 06, 2014, 08:57 AM

I grant that thought experiments can be useful in science and philosophy for revealing inconsistencies in opposing views, and they can also be helpful for developing new hypotheses, as they were for Einstein when he imagined himself chasing after a beam of light. But I know of no case in science where a theory was adopted merely on the basis of thought experiments. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 791-92  | Added on Thursday, March 06, 2014, 08:59 AM

As in science, the point of philosophy should be to improve concepts, not to analyze them. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 837-38  | Added on Thursday, March 06, 2014, 09:05 AM

Most people today are dualists, believing that a person consists of both a spiritual mind and a physical body. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 841-43  | Added on Thursday, March 06, 2014, 07:01 PM

According to modern astronomy, the earth is just another planet circling the sun, which is just one of billions of stars in billions of galaxies. According to Darwin, humans are just another biological species evolved through natural selection. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 841-45  | Added on Thursday, March 06, 2014, 07:02 PM

According to modern astronomy, the earth is just another planet circling the sun, which is just one of billions of stars in billions of galaxies. According to Darwin, humans are just another biological species evolved through natural selection. The Brain Revolution now in progress is even more threatening to humans' natural desire to think of ourselves as special, for it implies that our treasured thoughts and feelings are just another biological process. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 868-69  | Added on Friday, March 07, 2014, 08:42 AM

Aristotle believed that the primary organ supporting thought was the heart rather than the brain, whose main function was to cool the blood. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 46 | Loc. 889-91  | Added on Friday, March 07, 2014, 08:47 AM

At first it seems incredible that patterns of electrochemical activity in a bunch of cells could generate thought. Then again, it is also not obvious that a hundred musicians playing together could produce a beautiful symphony, or that billions of tiny water molecules in a cloud could accumulate a huge electrical charge that generates bright flashes of lightning and loud rolls of thunder. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 56 | Loc. 1047-48  | Added on Monday, March 10, 2014, 06:15 PM

Illness and the other difficulties of life are of small significance if you have the prospect of eternal happiness in heaven, united with God and all the people you care about who have died before you. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 1079-82  | Added on Tuesday, March 11, 2014, 08:53 AM

If consciousness can be explained by psychology and neuroscience, then the case for mind-brain identity is overwhelming. I argued that we already have excellent starts on neural explanations for perception, learning, memory, and other mental processes, such as reading. The main phenomena that might support the alternative hypothesis that minds are souls, including reports of communication with the dead, near-death experiences, and parapsychology, can be explained away as incidents of fraud and error. 
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- Highlight on Page 60 | Loc. 1126-28  | Added on Tuesday, March 11, 2014, 06:14 PM

As I argued in Chapter 2 , thought experiments are fine for suggesting and clarifying hypotheses, but it is folly to use them to try to justify the acceptance of beliefs. 
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This research suggests that mental processes are both neural and computational, combining the basic insight of functionalism with the mind-brain identity theory. 
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- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 1177-78  | Added on Wednesday, March 12, 2014, 09:01 AM

The religious idea of the immortal soul provided an appealing picture of the self as a spiritual entity, but overcoming the soul illusion requires a dramatic shift in how we view ourselves. 
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The Brain Revolution requires a major conceptual shift about the self, from viewing our selves as things to viewing them as complex processes. 
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Thinking of the self as a complex neural system takes us far from common sense, and further departures are required. 
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Claiming that minds are brains is compatible with the social character of persons and the self. 
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- Highlight on Page 65 | Loc. 1214-16  | Added on Wednesday, March 12, 2014, 09:13 AM

Shifting to understanding the world in terms of relational processes rather than things and simple properties has been a major part of the development of science, as in Newton's recognition that weight is a relation between objects, and the recognition of thermodynamic theory that heat is a process of motion of molecules. 
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- Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1216-18  | Added on Wednesday, March 12, 2014, 09:13 AM

More difficult even than such reclassifications are the emotional conceptual changes we must embrace to shift from the attractive picture of minds as immortal souls central to the universe to the biological picture of minds as neural processes of no apparent cosmic significance. 
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the things investigated by science exist independently of our minds, construed as brains. Using perception and inference, brains can develop objective knowledge of reality, including knowledge relevant to assessing the meaning of life. 
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- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 1237-39  | Added on Thursday, March 13, 2014, 08:59 AM

brain science and philosophical reflection together support a kind of constructive realism, the view that reality exists independently of minds, but that our knowledge of it is constructed by brain processes. 
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In fields such as history, anthropology, and cultural studies, it has become fashionable to claim that reality is just a social construction, so that the idea of objective knowledge is only a myth. 
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There is an old baseball story about three umpires calling balls and strikes. One says, “I call them as I see them.” The second says, “I call them as they are.” The third insists, “They ain't nothing until I call them.” These attitudes correspond to the philosophical positions of empiricism, realism, and idealism. 
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Testimony justified by inference to the best explanation allows me to reasonably believe many things observed by others. I have never been to Mount Everest myself but do not doubt its existence, because the observational reports of many others are better explained by the hypothesis that the mountain exists than by alternative hypotheses such as mass deception. 
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In sum, attention to how the brain functions in perception supports constructive realism over empiricism and idealism. The constructive nature of perception with both top-down and bottom-up processing shows the implausibility of a narrow empiricism that ties knowledge too closely to sensory input. On the other hand, the robustness of sensory inputs of different kinds counts by inference to the best explanation against the idealist view that the existence of objects is mind dependent. 
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- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1461-64  | Added on Monday, March 17, 2014, 08:54 AM

In chapter 3 , I argued for the conceptual shift away from thinking of minds as things to thinking of them as relational processes. Similarly, a difficult but explanatorily valuable part of the Brain Revolution is its shift away from thinking of concepts and their meaning as entities and toward understanding them as processes with relations along multiple dimensions, involving both the world and other concepts. 
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The second question is much more serious: if concepts can go beyond sense experience, how do we know which of them have anything to do with reality? There are many concepts that may be meaningful because of their relation to other concepts, but which fail to refer to anything in the world. Children readily acquire concepts such as elf and unicorn, but eventually learn that these are mythical. 
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Perhaps all our current scientific concepts are like that, temporary ways of thinking that will eventually be retired along with the superseded theories that contain them. I doubt, however, that most of our current scientific concepts will go the way of phlogiston. The reason that concepts like oxygen and atom are still around is evidence based, in line with the principles of inference to the best explanation described in chapter 2 . 
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I suspect that human understanding of time, like that of space and causality, is often difficult to put into words because its neural encoding is partly dependent on physiological rather than verbal representations. 
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- Highlight on Page 90 | Loc. 1626-27  | Added on Wednesday, March 19, 2014, 08:53 AM

Brains know reality through a combination of perception and inference to the best explanation of what is observed. Such inference attempts to maximize explanatory coherence, which sometimes requires rejection of what the senses tell us. 
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Knowledge is not a matter of pure coherence, because observational evidence does get some priority and provides some constraint on utterly fanciful speculation. Nevertheless, I advocate a kind of coherentism, the view that beliefs are justified by how well they fit with other beliefs and with sensory experience. 
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Reality consists of objects and their properties that we can learn about through perception and inference to the best explanation. 
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well-supported scientific theories are usually a more reliable guide to reality than is common sense, which is often derived from tradition rather than systematic evaluation of alternative hypotheses with respect to evidence. 
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According to the fossil record, the first mammals, whose brains were larger and more advanced than those of the reptiles they evolved from, came along only around two hundred million years ago. Hence we have abundant evidence that reality existed long before minds came along, and presumably will continue long after all minds are extinct. 
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minds are brains, so constructive realism is true. Rather, like all inferences, my conclusions are justified by overall coherence: given that minds are brains, and given everything else we know, the most coherent conclusion is that people use perception and inference to the best explanation to construct knowledge about reality. This process of justification will seem circular if you think that knowledge should have a foundation of indubitable truths from which other truths are derived. But no one has ever succeeded in identifying such a foundation in either sense experience or a priori reasoning, so we have to strive instead to construct the most coherent systems of representations that we can. 
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Emotions such as excitement and worry shape our knowledge of reality by guiding us to acquire information that matters to us. 
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There are indeed many ways in which emotional states can interfere with making good inferences, ranging from psychiatric problems such as mania and depression to more everyday afflictions such as wishful thinking, motivated inference, weakness of will, and self-deception. Understanding emotional brain processes can help us to deal with these problems, but it can also help us to appreciate how emotions are essential for effective thinking in all domains, from practical decision making to scientific discovery. 
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The mind does not just have concepts and beliefs, but also attaches values to them. 
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Philosophers and psychologists have long debated the nature of the emotions, and their proposed theories fall into two main camps: cognitive appraisal and bodily perception. According to cognitive appraisal theories, emotions are judgments about the extent to which a perceived situation accomplishes a person's goals. According to bodily perception theories, however, emotions are not judgments but rather perceptions of physiological states. 
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- Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 1826-28  | Added on Friday, March 21, 2014, 08:19 AM

Hence the parallel constraint satisfaction that assesses the relevance of situations to goals includes bodily perception as an important part. Emotions are not just gut reactions, because they also involve cognitive judgments. But contrary to purely cognitive theories of emotions, gut reactions are a part of appraisal. 
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- Highlight on Page 105 | Loc. 1843-45  | Added on Monday, March 24, 2014, 08:33 AM

I suggested in chapter 3 that finding mechanisms for consciousness is the major barrier to acceptance of the inference to the best explanation that minds are brains. I will not offer a full theory of consciousness in this book, but I will sketch how the EMOCON model suggests a mechanistic explanation of emotional consciousness. 
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- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 1881-86  | Added on Monday, March 24, 2014, 12:12 PM

Some philosophers will respond that they just can't imagine how feelings could be brain processes, and that they can easily imagine having brains exactly like ours without having any feelings. But I argued in chapter 2 that such capacities and incapacities for understanding the mind as brain should not be taken seriously, because what we manage to conceive is an indicator not of reality, but only of our current limited understanding of it. I predict that progress in neuroscience will continue to make it easier for us to think of mind as brain, and we will only get better at imagining how brains can feel emotions. 
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Spiritual experiences and philosophical intuitions are products of interacting brain processes, not sources of special evidence about the nature of mind and reality. 
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- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 1898-1902  | Added on Monday, March 24, 2014, 12:20 PM

One possibility is that emotional and other kinds of consciousness are just by-products of the organizational complexity of the brain, without any special evolutionary contribution. But it is also possible that brains evolved to have feelings as complex representations because of their contribution to the effectiveness of both individuals and groups. A feeling such as happiness or fear can provide a concise summary of the complex unconscious evaluation by constraint satisfaction of the advantages and dangers of a situation. Feelings provide succinct information about anticipated benefits and risks, and thereby foster quick and effective action. 
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Hence neural and molecular mechanistic explanations complement rather than compete with each other. 
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- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1931-32  | Added on Monday, March 24, 2014, 05:05 PM

Saying that concepts are patterns of neural activity enhances rather than eliminates the explanatory value of such representations. 
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Hence psychological explanations of emotions can coexist with and complement neural ones, just as molecular explanations can. 
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We should be neither reductionist, claiming that explanation ought to be at just one fundamental level, nor antireductionist, claiming that levels of explanation are independent of each other. The best approach to explaining mental events requires attention to multiple levels, from the social to the molecular, with a focus on how they interact. 
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Levels of explanation are intertwined, not simply reductive. But in rejecting a ruthless reductionism, we should not embrace a blind antireductionism that ignores how social groups consist of persons, who consist of organs such as brains, which consist of neurons, which consist of proteins and other molecules. 
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- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1968-69  | Added on Monday, March 24, 2014, 05:13 PM

There are at least five affective afflictions, ways our emotions can seriously skew our thinking away from rationality: motivated inference, self-deception, weakness of will, depression, and manic exuberance. 
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- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 2002-5  | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2014, 08:52 AM

The negative effects of motivated inference, self-deception, weakness of will, conflicts of interest, depression, and manic exuberance—and additional affective afflictions, including fears not based on evidence—do indeed make it tempting to embrace the classical view that emotions just get in the way of rational thinking. These affective afflictions make implausible the romantic view that our feelings are inherently good and just need to be let loose. 
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- Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 2021  | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2014, 08:57 AM

The simplest but nevertheless valuable rule I have heard is Michael Pollan's suggestion: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. 
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The simplest but nevertheless valuable rule I have heard is Michael Pollan's suggestion: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. By analogy, I propose this rule: feel emotions, not too strongly, mostly happy. 
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- Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 2029-31  | Added on Tuesday, March 25, 2014, 09:00 AM

The bodily perception component of the model suggests that we should be able to modify emotions by changing our physical states, and there are effective ways of accomplishing this. Meditation and other relaxation techniques can be used to calm breathing and heart rates, helping to reduce negative emotions such as anxiety. Exercise is another excellent way to relieve stress by changing bodily states. 
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- Highlight on Page 121 | Loc. 2122-25  | Added on Wednesday, March 26, 2014, 08:59 AM

Chapter 2 presented the view that beliefs are accepted or rejected on the basis of inference to the best explanation, which we achieve by evaluating competing hypotheses with respect to how well they explain all the available evidence. Analogously, I propose that decisions are made on the basis of inference to the best plan, which we achieve by evaluating competing actions with respect to how well they accomplish all the relevant goals. 
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In theory evaluation, you want to figure out which package of hypotheses provides the most explanatory power, whereas in decision making you need to find out which package of actions provides the most goal accomplishment. 
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The artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky has an intriguing idea about how early goals can arise because of what he calls attachment-based learning. Children naturally develop strong emotional attachments to their caregivers, usually parents. Caregivers transmit to children not only factual information but also emotional values, including ones that become attached to goals. 
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A related way of acquiring goals can come about through analogical thinking using role models. You may not be sure about what you want to do with your life, but someone you admire may suggest a set of goals that you can adopt as your own. 
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Other important goals arise naturally just because we care for other people, including family members, friends, and, at times, a broader range of people in need. 
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As we saw in chapter 5 , our brains operate with an integrated package of beliefs, emotions, and goals that change together. So social innovation requires changes in goals and emotions as well as in belief. 
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Here are some ways to really screw up your decisions. First, make them very rapidly, so that you do not have time to consider all the relevant actions and goals. Instead of considering a range of possible actions, fixate on one set of actions and ignore others that might accomplish your goals better. 
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Second, avoid collecting reliable information about the extent to which different actions facilitate different goals. 
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Third, neglect to carefully evaluate the importance of different goals. 
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Fourth, once you have a made a decision, be completely confident in your choice and ignore any new information about developing situations that might make you inclined to change your plan. 
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Fifth, make the decision on your own without consulting other people who might have a broader idea of the full range of possible actions, goals, and factual connections between them. 
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Sixth and finally, make your decisions in line with only your own goals, and ignore the goals and needs of other people. 
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It would be misleading, however, to attempt to redefine free will as this kind of control of behavior by thought, if thought is recognized as a neural process. We should not underestimate the attractiveness of full-blown, brain-independent free will, which like immortality is something that is naturally desired. Both are part of the powerful lure of dualism. The thought that your life need not end with death has great appeal, and so does the vision that you are, in the words of Tennyson, the master of your fate and the captain of your soul. 
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Ideas about predetermination and fate are essentially religious; they pose no scientific threat to the reduced kind of freedom consistent with viewing the brain as a collection of causal processes. 
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Similarly, if your actions are caused by brain processes including ones highly susceptible to the kinds of cognitive and emotional distortions that can result in bad decisions, then you have more reason to be tolerant of yourself when you sometimes make mistakes. You also have an excellent reason to be more tolerant of others, appreciating that their mistakes are the result not of willful sins but of a multiplicity of causal forces. 
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Emotions such as guilt, shame, and remorse can still be appropriate, as long as they serve to prevent mistakes in the future. But there is no point to the overwhelming sense of sinfulness, fear, and trembling that afflicts some religious people. 
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You don't tell your brain what to do, and your brain doesn't tell you what to do: you are your brain deciding what to do in your physical and social environment. 
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Wisdom—knowing what matters—requires the adaptive capability of acquiring, abandoning, and revaluing goals. 
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Historically, the main alternative to nihilism has been the theological view that God created the universe and established a purpose for it. 
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It found that happiness on average is fairly stable through the life span, with a very mild peak around age 51. This result is consistent with the view of some psychologists that each person has a “set point,” a level of happiness that is only mildly perturbed by life events. 
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Except for family satisfaction, which also peaked around 50, these showed very different patterns from overall happiness. Financial satisfaction tended to rise steadily after 40, but job satisfaction tended to peak around age 62. Satisfaction with health, on the other hand, fell steadily from age 18 on. 
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- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2586-92  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 06:36 PM

People with incomes over $100,000 were twice as likely to be very happy as those with incomes under $30,000, and they were significantly happier than those with incomes between $75,000 and $100,000 (49 percent versus 38 percent). Other correlations also stand out. Married people are happier than unmarrieds, although having children makes little additional difference. People who attend religious services frequently are happier. Republicans are happier than Democrats, an effect not accounted for solely by the fact that rich people are happier than poor ones. The largest factor that predicts differences in happiness is being in good health, as 55 percent of people who say their health is poor describe themselves as not too happy. Another demographic group with happiness deficits consists of single parents with minor age children, 27 percent of whom report being not too happy. 
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- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2614-17  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 08:45 AM

You can have happiness without much meaning, and meaning without much happiness; so happiness is not the meaning of life. Happiness is having your goals satisfied, but meaning additionally involves having worthwhile goals that may or may not be satisfied. Hence we cannot simply conclude that the meaning of life is happiness; we need to look in more detail at the nature of goals and how they contribute to meaning. 
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It would be pointless, however, to maintain a goal that you know you cannot achieve. Hence goal abandonment is an important part of rationality, in addition to goal adoption. 
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In sum, your life is meaningful to the extent that you have goals, which are emotionally valued mental representations of situations, consisting of patterns of neural activity; some of your goals have been accomplished to some degree; you have other goals not yet accomplished that you have reasonable prospects of accomplishing; your goals are coherent with each other; and your goals are objectively valuable. 
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- Highlight on Page 153 | Loc. 2686-88  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 01:55 PM

Romantic love can be viewed as a goal-oriented state that leads to specific emotions such as euphoria and anxiety rather than as a specific emotion. Its neurophysiology seems to differ from that of mere sexual attraction and also from that of long-term attachment. 
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Hence evidence is mounting that social and physical pain have similar mechanisms that can be understood in terms of brain regions such as the anterior cingulate and chemical processes that occur in them. Minds are brains whether they're feeling good or bad. 
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- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2777-79  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:35 PM

The richest Americans have a high level of life satisfaction, but theirs is not a great deal higher than that of people with middle incomes, and no higher than that of the Pennsylvania Amish, who lead very simple lives. Hence there seems to be no reason to adopt money as a major goal in itself, so work is not just a reason to make money. 
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In sum, work can be a major source of meaning in people's lives not only for external reasons such as providing income and social contacts, but especially for internal reasons tied to the neural nature of problem solving.Jobs that set challenging but reachable goals provide people with motivating tasks that can be inherently enjoyable, because the adoption and accomplishment of goals is a major part of the emotional system in our brains. For most people, finishing challenging tasks is much more satisfying than slacker serenity. 
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Without competence, autonomy, and relatedness, it is very difficult to function as a human being. Moreover, there is growing evidence presented below concerning the neural mechanisms underlying these needs. 
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Without competence, autonomy, and relatedness, it is very difficult to function as a human being. 
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You act autonomously whenever your decisions are based on your own goals, even if the neural process of inference to the best plan is incompatible with the kind of free will that dualism promises but fails to deliver. 
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Love, work, and play are goals whose pursuit contributes centrally to the meaning of life because their achievement satisfies vital needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy. 
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The major constraints that make it impossible to pursue all these goals are the limited supplies of time, energy, and money. Hence the key to avoiding incoherence is to allocate these supplies so as to ensure that love, work, and play each get enough time, energy, and money to make possible an acceptable degree of life satisfaction. 
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Expressing gratitude Cultivating optimism Avoiding overthinking and social comparison Practicing acts of kindness Nurturing social relationships Developing strategies for coping Learning to forgive Increasing flow experiences where one is absorbed in an activity Savoring life's joys Committing to your goals Practicing religion and spirituality Taking care of your body through physical activity Except for number 11, these all fit very well with the emphasis in this chapter on how people can develop happiness and meaning in their lives through the pursuit of goals concerning love, work, and play. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 181 | Loc. 3165-67  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 08:45 AM

Religions such as Christianity have provided a conceptual and emotional framework for dealing with death, but a better way to manage fear of nonexistence is simply to strive to ensure that by the time you die, you will have largely accomplished your goals and abandoned the unreasonable ones. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 3173-75  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 08:48 AM

Understanding the neural basis of psychological needs such as relatedness, competence, and autonomy enables us to see how psychological needs are biological needs. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 186 | Loc. 3244-48  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 08:41 AM

Second, understanding moral intuitions as neural processes of emotional consciousness can start to explain why there is both much agreement and much disagreement about what is right and wrong. Agreement is explained in part by the fact that almost all people share the same neurological structures described in the EMOCON model, including areas such as the amygdala and the insula needed for bodily perceptions and structures such as the prefrontal cortex and the dopamine system needed for cognitive appraisal. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3257-59  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 08:42 AM

Why some people lack the normal capability for moral intuition is just beginning to be understood at the neural level. One prominent theory is that psychopaths have amygdala damage that interferes with the kind of emotional learning one needs to acquire moral reactions to other people's experience of harm. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3261  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 08:42 AM

Differences in moral judgments can also result from damage to other brain areas, such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 3273-74  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 08:47 AM

why might you be concerned with the goals and well-being of other people besides yourself? It turns out that you have special kinds of neural populations that make concern for others very natural. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 3285-87  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 06:06 PM

Not only does a monkey's mirror neuron system give it a direct understanding of what another monkey is doing when it moves; it also facilitates imitating those motions that might be useful for its own goals, such as finding food. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 3336  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 08:52 AM

Mirror neuron areas help us to understand the emotions of other people because they fire when we see others expressing their emotions. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 3344-46  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 08:54 AM

In sum, empathy can be based on the kind of verbal analogical mapping discussed by Barnes and me; but it can more fundamentally involve direct perceptual detection of the relation between someone's situation and your own via your mirror neurons. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 3361-63  | Added on Tuesday, April 22, 2014, 08:55 AM

The adoption of norms enables us to reason about what is right and wrong, but these norms have an emotional underpinning that intrinsically provides a connection between morality and action: people are moral because of their emotional commitment to normative rules. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 3371-72  | Added on Tuesday, April 22, 2014, 08:57 AM

Normal children do not need to reason about why harm is bad for other people; they can actually feel that harm is bad. Thus mirror neurons provide motivation not to harm others by virtue of direct understanding of what it is for another to be harmed. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 194 | Loc. 3383-84  | Added on Tuesday, April 22, 2014, 09:03 AM

For ethics, the capacity to care about others is at least as important as the ability to reason about them. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 3389-90  | Added on Tuesday, April 22, 2014, 09:05 AM

Mirror neurons and emotional contagion get us started on moral appreciation of the interests of others, but much socialization is required to improve it. We need moral education to reinforce resistance to the psychopathic suggestion that self-interest is the highest good. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3433-35  | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 09:14 AM

Hence instead of trying to reduce the good to a single goal, pleasure, we can allow that many goals can be relevant to assessing the good. This view is called pluralistic consequentialism, because it allows a variety of goals whose accomplishment can constitute good consequences. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3445-46  | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 09:17 AM

Many religious traditions, going back to the ancient Greeks, have some variant of the golden rule, that you should treat others as you yourself want to be treated. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3452-54  | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 09:18 AM

Thus the golden rule is a tool for empathy and caring, not for intellectual exercises such as the veil of ignorance or Kant's categorical imperative, which tells you to act in ways that you can will to be universal. The natural psychological progression is from mirror neuron activity to empathy to emotional and intellectual appreciation of the needs of others. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 3476-79  | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 09:23 AM

Another major problem with consequentialism is that it seems to demand too much of people. It expects us to consider the consequences for all people equally, which means that we should consider strangers as on a par with ourselves and with people we are close to, like family members. But very few people are capable of counting the happiness of themselves and people they love as no more important than that of people they will never meet. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 3482-84  | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 09:23 AM

Thanks to mirror neurons and the cognitive and bodily aspects of emotional intuition, people are capable of caring about other people in general. But we cannot expect them to put aside a special concern for the well-being of their loved ones. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 3484-85  | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 09:26 AM

Hence ideas about vital needs can be used to overcome the most serious objections to consequentialism as an ethical theory by making it pluralistic, compatible with rights, and sensitive to social ties. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 3492-94  | Added on Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 09:29 AM

Thus needs-based consequentialism is the most plausible ethical theory currently available, and opens the possibility that judgments about right and wrong might be objective. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3543-47  | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2014, 09:01 AM

In sum, moral objectivity becomes possible if we look, not to theology or a priori reasoning, but to evidence drawn from biology and psychology. Needs-based consequentialism fits well with the brain-based emotional consciousness account of moral intuition and with the cultural diversity of moral behavior. The difficulty of arriving at indisputable moral principles is the result not of moral relativity, but rather of the huge complexity of determining the range and importance of human psychological needs and calculating the consequences of the available range of actions. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3547-48  | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2014, 09:02 AM

Moral judgments are very difficult decisions, but we can still strive to use all we know about the nature of the world and human minds to make them the best we can. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 204 | Loc. 3556-58  | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2014, 09:04 AM

The distinguished neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga accepts the view that decisions and actions are determined by brain processes, but argues that we can hold on to the idea of responsibility as a property of persons, not brains. He maintains that responsibility is a human construct that exists only in the social world, not a property of brains. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 3565-67  | Added on Thursday, April 24, 2014, 09:08 AM

Then holding someone responsible for acting immorally does have a point: we want to try to ensure that future decisions, by the person blamed as well as by other people, are made on the basis of goals that include the interests and needs of all those concerned. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 3572-79  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 03:26 PM

Hence the Brain Revolution does not require abandoning the idea of moral responsibility, but it does change it substantially. On the traditional, dualist view, a person is a mind that is a soul, and actions are the result of free choices not fully determined by physical causes. People who make bad choices of their own free will can be held responsible for them and deserve to be punished. But on the view I have been defending, actions are the result of decisions that are physical brain processes, so the point of responsibility and punishment cannot be the sinful nature of what a person has done. Rather, holding people responsible for their actions and punishing them are justified if they have the good social consequences of reducing harm to people in the future. As Gazzaniga suggests, we should think of a person as a social being, understood in terms of relationships to other persons, not just as a brain or body. If persons are conceived as social and the point of holding them responsible is social improvement, then the idea of moral responsibility survives. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 3586-90  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 03:33 PM

At first glance, it might seem that my rejection of free will is incompatible with the need for autonomy. How can people feel that their activities are self-chosen if their decisions are just neural activity? The answer requires replacing the traditional concept of the self, an immortal soul free of physical constraints, with a concept informed by neuroscience. Then the self can be viewed as a complex neural system encompassing representational structures and processing capacities that differentiate between (a) actions that are generated by internal decision making based on intrinsic interests and (b) actions that are externally coerced or motivated. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 3600-3601  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 03:36 PM

Moral intuitions by themselves are not evidence that something is right or wrong, and must be evaluated as to whether they reflect objective moral concerns or merely previous biased experience or coercive and arbitrary inculcation by bogus moral authorities. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 208 | Loc. 3621-22  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 03:41 PM

You cannot derive an ought from an is, but you can appreciate that some proposed oughts fit much better than do others with what we know about minds, brains, and cultures. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 208 | Loc. 3622-25  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 03:41 PM

Consequentialism about vital needs is coherent with biological and psychological knowledge, and therefore provides a better approach to normative ethics than do alternatives such as theological and Kantian ethics. Indeed, moral objectivity is possible because there are psychological, neurological, and social facts about what humans need to function and thrive. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 209 | Loc. 3639-40  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 04:33 PM

Anecdotes are at best a weak form of evidence, and the made-up thought experiments favored by many philosophers are not evidence at all. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 209 | Loc. 3640-43  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 04:33 PM

I have used more systematic forms of evidence to argue for two main claims about reality, that minds are physical systems constituted by brains interacting with bodies and the world, and that the world exists independently of anyone's mind. We know reality not just by collecting the results of observation and experiment, but also by forming theories that we can evaluate to see whether they are part of the best explanation of the full range of available evidence. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 3664-66  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 04:40 PM

We can use evidence to help us select theories and to identify practices and goals, at the same time that evidence is influenced by theories, and practices and goals are influencing each other. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 3668-75  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 04:42 PM

The kind of parallel process presented in figure 10.1 can be hard to grasp, so here is a more linear depiction of how descriptive evidence can help to establish prescriptive norms. I will call this sequence the normative procedure. Identify a domain of practices, such as scientific inference ( chapter 2 ) or ethical reasoning ( chapter 9 ). Identify candidate norms for these practices, such as inference to the best explanation ( chapter 2 ) or consequentialism ( chapter 9 ). Identify the appropriate goals of the practices in the given domain, such as truth ( chapter 4 ) and vital needs ( chapter 8 ). Evaluate the extent to which different practices accomplish the relevant goals. Adopt as domain norms those practices that best accomplish the relevant goals. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 220 | Loc. 3826-28  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 05:17 PM

I hope that increased knowledge about interconnected multilevel mechanisms will be useful for explaining human thinking, and, further, for creating new ways to approach difficult social problems. Then philosophy and neuroscience will serve not only to interpret the world, but also to help change it. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 223 | Loc. 3870-71  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 05:26 PM

Abstract mathematical statements such as those in set theory and number theory are fictional assertions rather than necessary truths. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 223 | Loc. 3873-75  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 05:26 PM

I think that pure mathematics sometimes turns out to be scientifically useful for the same reason that good fiction can tell us much about human psychology and social relations. Harry Potter and wizards do not exist, but J. K. Rowling's characters are based on her familiarity with and understanding of human social relations. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 224 | Loc. 3878-79  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 05:27 PM

The writer Julian Barnes said that the novel tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths. Mathematics tells beautiful, exact lies that sometimes approximate to messy truths. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 224 | Loc. 3888-92  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 05:31 PM

Few educated people now buy the biblical picture that the world was created just six thousand years ago, but there is still some appeal to the idea that God made the big bang and thereby created the universe. Problems with this view are easily spotted, such as how a nonmaterial being managed to create matter and energy, but there is something more satisfying about the idea of a creator than about the idea of our universe just popping into existence through some kind of inexplicable quantum fluctuation. Theology still seems more explanatory than does magic. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 225 | Loc. 3905-7  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 05:48 PM

I mention the cyclic model here because it shows the possibility of an evidence-based answer to the question of why there is something and not nothing. According to the model, there has always been something, namely, branes, which are the historical causes of the existence of an infinite number of universes, including ours. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 225 | Loc. 3909-12  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 05:50 PM

Perhaps the cyclic universe is not emotionally satisfying, because it stands far from providing any kind of reassurance about the meaning of the universe and our place in it. But it is potentially cognitively satisfying because it provides a nonmysterious mechanism by which our universe could have come to be. If I someday write a second edition of this book, I hope it will have a chapter section called “Branes and the Meaning of Life.” 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 3917-20  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 05:53 PM

I see the anthropic principle as yet another attempt to stage a Ptolemaic counterrevolution, aiming to put human minds back at the center of reality. This attempt is no more successful than its many predecessors, including Kant's theory of knowledge, Husserl's phenomenology, Buddhist mysticism, New Age wishful spirituality, postmodernism, the Wittgensteinian defense of everyday concepts, and consciousness-based interpretations of quantum mechanics. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 3920-23  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 05:53 PM

Rejecting idealism and the lure of dualism, we need to comprehend the insights of physics, biology, and neuroscience that our minds are just another physical process in a vast universe. The cyclic theory shows how this universe might have come into existence through a physical mechanism, without generating spurious reassurance about the centrality of human thinking to reality. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 228 | Loc. 3960-62  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 06:01 PM

Problems about reality, knowledge, morality, and meaning are all connected, not by transcendental truths, but by the history and nature of human beings in a physical universe. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 247 | Loc. 4435-36  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 11:31 PM

Psychopathic behavior can also result from damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, as in the case of Phineas Gage, and (I conjecture) from reading Ayn Rand. 
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The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Paul Thagard)
- Highlight on Page 250 | Loc. 4520-21  | Added on Saturday, April 26, 2014, 11:39 PM

My hope is that neural naturalism can help to rescue cultural studies from the pit of postmodernism, which combines obsolete psychology (Freud) with outmoded politics (Marx) and obscure philosophy (Heidegger). 
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La Peste (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 1266-67  | Added on Tuesday, July 15, 2014, 10:49 AM

Simplement, le prêche rendit plus sensible à certains l’idée, vague jusque-là, qu’ils étaient condamnés, pour un crime inconnu, à un emprisonnement inimaginable.
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La Peste (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 1307-10  | Added on Tuesday, July 15, 2014, 10:55 AM

À la rigueur, c’est assez facile de choisir entre mais et et. C’est déjà plus difficile d’opter entre et et puis. La difficulté grandit avec puis et ensuite. Mais assurément, ce qu’il y a de plus difficile, c’est de savoir s’il faut mettre et ou s’il ne faut pas.
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La Peste (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 1330-33  | Added on Tuesday, July 15, 2014, 10:58 AM

– Ce n’est là qu’une approximation. Quand je serai arrivé à rendre parfaitement le tableau que j’ai dans l’imagination, quand ma phrase aura l’allure même de cette promenade au trot, une-deux-trois, une-deux-trois, alors le reste sera plus facile et surtout l’illusion sera telle, dès le début, qu’il sera possible de dire : « Chapeau bas ! »
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La Peste (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 1702-4  | Added on Saturday, July 19, 2014, 11:46 AM

Mais il vient toujours une heure dans l’histoire où celui qui ose dire que deux et deux font quatre est puni de mort. L’instituteur le sait bien. Et la question n’est pas de savoir quelle est la récompense ou la punition qui attend ce raisonnement. La question est de savoir si deux et deux, oui ou non, font quatre.
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La Peste (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 2679-81  | Added on Thursday, July 24, 2014, 07:50 PM

Mais Rieux se redressa et dit d’une voix ferme que cela était stupide et qu’il n’y avait pas de honte à préférer le bonheur. – Oui, dit Rambert, mais il peut y avoir de la honte à être heureux tout seul.
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La Peste (Albert Camus)
- Highlight Loc. 2953  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 10:12 PM

– Si un prêtre consulte un médecin, il y a contradiction.
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 136-37  | Added on Tuesday, August 12, 2014, 09:07 AM

God sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself. Barking mad! 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 277-78  | Added on Tuesday, August 12, 2014, 09:27 AM

A deepity is a statement that looks profound but is not. Deepities appear true at one level, but on all other levels are meaningless. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 309-11  | Added on Tuesday, August 12, 2014, 06:17 PM

If one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. “Faith” is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief, but when one just goes ahead and believes anyway. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 311-12  | Added on Tuesday, August 12, 2014, 06:17 PM

Another way to think about “belief without evidence” is to think of an irrational leap over probabilities. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 402-3  | Added on Wednesday, August 13, 2014, 09:31 AM

A difference between an atheist and a person of faith is that an atheist is willing to revise their belief (if provided sufficient evidence); the faithful permit no such revision. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 442-43  | Added on Wednesday, August 13, 2014, 06:42 PM

Faith claims are knowledge claims. Faith claims are statements of fact about the world. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 452-53  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 08:53 AM

If a belief is based on insufficient evidence, then any further conclusions drawn from the belief will at best be of questionable value. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 473-74  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 08:57 AM

Believing things on the basis of something other than evidence and reason causes people to misconstrue what’s good for them and what’s good for their communities. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 705  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 09:06 AM

Certainty is an enemy of truth: examination and reexamination are allies of truth. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 713-14  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 11:53 AM

Faith taints or at worst removes our curiosity about the world, what we should value, and what type of life we should lead. Faith replaces wonder with epistemological arrogance disguised as false humility. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 717-18  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 11:56 AM

Once we understand that we don’t possess knowledge, we have a basis to go forward in a life of examination, wonder, and critical reflection. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 719-20  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 11:56 AM

Wonder, curiosity, honest self-reflection, sincerity, and the desire to know are a solid basis for a life worth living. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 1079-82  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 11:59 AM

What Kierkegaard means is that if you want to live a full, meaningful human life—catch hold of anxiety and don’t let it go. Use anxiety to follow your thoughts as a guide to see where it leads you. Don’t try to escape. Let it energize your life; let it bring you awareness not only of your ignorance but also of your desire to understand moments in every experience. At least for Kierkegaard, holding onto anxiety is a key to a fulfilled life. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 1084-86  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 12:13 PM

Many people of faith come to their beliefs independent of reason. In order to reason them out of their faith they’ll have to be taught how to reason first, and then instructed in the application of this new tool to their epistemic condition. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 776-77  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 12:16 PM

Reasoning away faith means helping people to abandon a faulty epistemology, but reasoning away religion means that people abandon their social support network. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 840-45  | Added on Friday, August 15, 2014, 12:06 AM

Combine clustering in like-minded communities with filter bubbles, then put that on top of a cognitive architecture that predisposes one to belief (Shermer, 2012) and favors confirmation bias, then throw in the fact that critical thinking and reasoning require far more intellectual labor than acceptance of simple solutions and platitudes, then liberally sprinkle the virulence of certain belief systems, then infuse with the idea that holding certain beliefs and using certain processes of reasoning are moral acts, and then lay this entire mixture upon the difficulty of just trying to make a living and get through the day with any time for reflection, and voilà: Doxastic closure! 5 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 1253-54  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 06:05 PM

Bringing facts into the discussion is the wrong way to conceptualize the problem: the problem is with epistemologies people use, not with conclusions people hold. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 1314-16  | Added on Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 09:16 AM

By undermining faith one is able to undermine almost all religions simultaneously, and it may be easier to help someone to abandon their faith than it is to separate them from their religion. Your interventions should target faith, not religion. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 1324-27  | Added on Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 09:17 AM

This is how the vast majority of believers experience their religious life—as a communal and social event that adds meaning, purpose, and joy to their lives (Argyle, 2000, p. 111). Attacks on religion are often perceived as attacks on friends, families, communities, and relationships. As such, attacking religion may alienate people, making it even more difficult to separate them from their faith. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 1329-33  | Added on Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 06:43 PM

Religion is not necessarily an insurmountable barrier to reason and rationality. The problem is not that people are reading ancient texts. I read Shakespeare with my son. I don’t, however, think that Iago, Hamlet, and Lear were historical figures. I also don’t derive my ultimate moral authority from Shakespeare’s works. I don’t want to kill people who have rival interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays. Nor do I attempt to bring Othello into decisions at the ballot box. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 1339-40  | Added on Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 06:44 PM

Belief in God(s) is not the problem. Belief without evidence is the problem. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 1421  | Added on Wednesday, August 20, 2014, 08:50 AM

First, I’ll ask, “How could your belief [in X] be wrong?” 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 1419-21  | Added on Wednesday, August 20, 2014, 08:50 AM

Occasionally, when I’m pressed for time and can’t give my interlocutor a comprehensive Socratic treatment (for example, in line at the grocery store), I use two powerful dialectical shortcuts. First, I’ll ask, “How could your belief [in X] be wrong?” 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 1432-34  | Added on Wednesday, August 20, 2014, 08:51 AM

Second, I’ll ask, “How would you differentiate your belief from a delusion? We have unshakable testimony of countless people who feel in their heart that the Emperor of Japan is divine, or that Muhammad’s revelations in the Koran are true. How do you know you’re not delusional?” 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 1439-43  | Added on Wednesday, August 20, 2014, 08:52 AM

Instead they’ll reply, rarely with anger, more often with sincerity, “Well how do you know that your beliefs aren’t delusions? How do you know you’re not wrong?” To which I respond, “I could very well be wrong about any of my beliefs. I could also misconstrue reality. The difference between misconstruing reality and being delusional is the willingness to revise a belief. If I’m genuinely willing to revise my belief I’m much less likely to think it’s a delusion. Are you willing to revise your belief that [insert belief here]”? 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 1924-25  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 11:36 PM

The Socratic method has five stages: (1) wonder; (2) hypothesis; (3) elenchus, (4) accepting or revising the hypothesis; (5) acting accordingly 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 2277-80  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 11:37 PM

When appropriate, incorporate strategies noted in chapter 4: be attentive to context, don’t develop adversarial relationships or negative tones, “roll with it,” divorce belief from morality, focus on epistemology and not metaphysics, target faith not religion, and model the behavior you want the subject to emulate. Develop a safe space for discussion, almost a camaraderie. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 2471-72  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 08:49 AM

Helping people, especially children, to be comfortable with not knowing, yet at the same time encouraging the development of curiosity, of wonder, and of a zest to explore the world, is a crucial and indispensable undertaking. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 2823-24  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:59 PM

Science is the antithesis of faith. Science is a process that contains multiple and redundant checks, balances, and safeguards against human bias. Science has a built-in corrective mechanism—hypothesis testing— that weeds out false claims. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 2825-26  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:59 PM

Claims that come about as a result of a scientific process are held as tentatively true by scientists—unlike claims of faith that are held as eternally true. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 2825-27  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 11:00 PM

Claims that come about as a result of a scientific process are held as tentatively true by scientists—unlike claims of faith that are held as eternally true. Related to this, claims that come about as the result of a scientific process are falsifiable, that is, there is a way to show the claims are 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 2825-27  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 11:00 PM

Claims that come about as a result of a scientific process are held as tentatively true by scientists—unlike claims of faith that are held as eternally true. Related to this, claims that come about as the result of a scientific process are falsifiable, that is, there is a way to show the claims are false. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight Loc. 2925-28  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:01 AM

I’ve never really understood how removing a bad way to reason will make it difficult to get through the day. If anything, it would seem that correcting someone’s reasoning would significantly increase their chances of getting through the day. With reliable forms of reasoning comes the capability of crafting conditions that enable people to navigate life’s obstacles. By using a more reliable form of reasoning, people are more capable of bringing about conditions that enable them to flourish. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight on Page 156 | Loc. 2975-76  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 06:46 PM

“What people believe, and how they act, matter. They particularly matter in a democracy where people have a certain amount of influence over the lives of their fellow citizens. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight on Page 156 | Loc. 2975-79  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 06:46 PM

“What people believe, and how they act, matter. They particularly matter in a democracy where people have a certain amount of influence over the lives of their fellow citizens. My intent is not to be a jerk. I don’t buy into the notion that criticizing an idea makes me a bad person. A criticism of an idea is not the same as a criticism of a person. We are not our ideas. Ideas don’t deserve dignity; people deserve dignity. I’m criticizing an idea because that idea is not true, and the fact that people think it is true has dangerous consequences.” 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 3289-90  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 08:19 AM

Contemporary academic leftism turned the rational analysis of criticizing a process one uses to know reality from an epistemological critique into a moral taboo. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight on Page 174 | Loc. 3294-96  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 08:20 AM

Multiculturalism contributed to this confusion by extending immutable properties of people—like race, gender, sexual orientation, religion—to all epistemic systems, cultural ways of knowing, faith traditions, local mythologies, etc. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight on Page 174 | Loc. 3310-12  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 08:25 AM

(There are people of different faiths and different races who experience genuine instances of discrimination and hatred. Conflating the categories of ideas and people, and medicalizing rational criticism, both demeans the experience of people who suffer from discrimination and simultaneously tosses away a root liberty: the freedom to rationally analyze and critique.) 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 3371-72  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 12:09 PM

Faith is not an immutable characteristic; people leave and switch faith traditions. It is not like gender or ethnicity. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 3418-21  | Added on Monday, September 01, 2014, 08:53 AM

Faith is a process of attempting to know the world that will decrease the likelihood of coming to true conclusions, or in philosophical parlance, using faith will not yield warranted belief. One way we know this is that different faith traditions make competing claims and these claims cannot all be correct—yet they can all be false. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 3796  | Added on Monday, September 01, 2014, 06:58 PM

Faith is an unclassified cognitive illness disguised as a moral virtue. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 3813-15  | Added on Monday, September 01, 2014, 07:01 PM

It’s important we believe things that are true. 1 It’s important there’s some lawful correspondence between what we believe and the actual state of affairs. Only when our beliefs accurately correspond to reality are we able to mold external conditions that enable us to flourish. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight on Page 202 | Loc. 3835-36  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 09:29 AM

It matters how we talk about things. It matters what words we use. Certain words trap us into a make-believe picture of life—one that is false and misleading. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3850-52  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 09:34 AM

if you care about the future and you want something to get done—then do it. You cannot know the future, so take action. Don’t wait for things to happen. Don’t pray. Don’t have faith. Don’t rely upon imagined entities. Act. 
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A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian)
- Highlight on Page 222 | Loc. 4193-97  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 09:42 AM

What figures like Nietzsche teach us is that the sense of meaninglessness is a result of millennia of dependency on mythological thinking. When myths are shown to be false, the result is a sense of despair because we’ve been dependent upon them for so long. The step out of meaninglessness should not be dependency on a new myth (the New Age movement, Scientology, Mormonism), but self-sufficiency and a tough-mindedness that is weary of resting the sense of meaning on what someone else has said or done or promised. We have to earn meaning for ourselves. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 711-13  | Added on Tuesday, September 09, 2014, 08:25 AM

If you would be left with any experience, however indescribable—some spectrum of sights, sounds, sensations, feelings—that is what consciousness is in the case of a bat. If being transformed into a bat were tantamount to annihilation, however, then bats are not conscious. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 718-20  | Added on Tuesday, September 09, 2014, 08:26 AM

As a matter of your experience, you are not a body of atoms, molecules, and cells; you are consciousness and its ever-changing contents, passing through various stages of wakefulness and sleep, from cradle to grave. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 734-35  | Added on Tuesday, September 09, 2014, 08:30 AM

If you think the important part of consciousness is its link to speech and behavior, spare a moment to consider the problem of “anesthesia awareness.” It is a cure for much bad philosophy. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 742-44  | Added on Tuesday, September 09, 2014, 08:34 AM

As our understanding of the physical world has evolved, our notion of what counts as “physical” has broadened considerably. A world teeming with fields and forces, vacuum fluctuations, and the other gossamer spawn of modern physics is not the physical world of common sense. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 742-44  | Added on Tuesday, September 09, 2014, 08:37 AM

As our understanding of the physical world has evolved, our notion of what counts as “physical” has broadened considerably. A world teeming with fields and forces, vacuum fluctuations, and the other gossamer spawn of modern physics is not the physical world of common sense. In fact, our common sense seems to be stuck somewhere in the sixteenth century. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 773-76  | Added on Tuesday, September 09, 2014, 06:22 PM

First there is a physical world, unconscious and seething with unperceived events; then, by virtue of some physical property or process, consciousness itself springs, or staggers, into being. This idea seems to me not merely strange but perfectly mysterious. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true. When we linger over the details, however, this notion of emergence seems merely a placeholder for a miracle. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 859-60  | Added on Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 09:15 AM

Are we unconscious during sleep or merely unable to remember what sleep is like? Can human minds be duplicated? Neuroscience may one day answer such questions—and the answers might well surprise us. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 860-62  | Added on Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 09:15 AM

But the reality of consciousness appears irreducible. Only consciousness can know itself—and directly, through first-person experience. It follows, therefore, that rigorous introspection—“spirituality” in the widest sense of the term—is an indispensable 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 860-63  | Added on Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 09:16 AM

But the reality of consciousness appears irreducible. Only consciousness can know itself—and directly, through first-person experience. It follows, therefore, that rigorous introspection—“spirituality” in the widest sense of the term—is an indispensable part of understanding the nature of the mind. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 924-25  | Added on Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 12:04 PM

What is most startling about the split-brain phenomenon is that we have every reason to believe that the isolated right hemisphere is independently conscious. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 942-43  | Added on Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 06:18 PM

The question of whether the right hemisphere is conscious is really a pseudo-mystery used to bar the door to a great one: the uncanny fact that the human mind can be divided with a knife. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1032-33  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 08:36 AM

All brains—and persons—may be split to one or another degree. Each of us may live, even now, in a fluid state of split and overlapping subjectivity. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1048-52  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 08:38 AM

We now know that at least two systems in the brain—often referred to as “dual processes”—govern human cognition, emotion, and behavior. One is evolutionarily older, unconscious, and automatic; the other evolved more recently and is both conscious and deliberative. When you find another person annoying, sexually attractive, or inadvertently funny, you are experiencing the percolations of System 1. The heroic efforts you make to conceal these feelings out of politeness are the work of System 2. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1075-77  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 05:53 PM

Despite the obvious importance of the unconscious mind, consciousness is what matters to us—not just for the purpose of spiritual practice but in every aspect of our lives. Consciousness is the substance of any experience we can have or hope for, now or in the future. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1080-82  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 05:54 PM

Consciousness is also what gives our lives a moral dimension. Without consciousness, we would have no cause to wonder how we should behave toward other human beings, nor could we care how we were treated in return. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1099-1101  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 08:21 PM

The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in the first place. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1270-73  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 09:02 PM

This is an empirical claim: Look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion. The problem with a claim of this kind, however, is that one can’t borrow another person’s contemplative tools to test it. To see how the feeling of “I” is a product of thought—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted by thought you tend to be in the first place—you have to build your own contemplative tools. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1308-9  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 09:20 PM

Every moment of the day— indeed, every moment throughout one’s life—offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1316-20  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 09:22 PM

I am not advocating that we be irrationally detached from the reality of our lives. If a problem needs fixing, we should fix it. But how miserable must we be while doing good and necessary things? And if, like many people, you tend to be vaguely unhappy much of the time, it can be very helpful to manufacture a feeling of gratitude by simply contemplating all the terrible things that have not happened to you, or to think of how many people would consider their prayers answered if they could only live as you are now. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1371-74  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 09:48 PM

Thinking is the basis of every social relationship and cultural institution we have. It is also the foundation of science. But our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one’s head. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1390-91  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 09:02 AM

It doesn’t matter if your mind is wandering over current problems in set theory or cancer research; if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1401-3  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 09:05 AM

The feeling that we call “I” is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1414-16  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 09:09 AM

We seem to be riding around inside our bodies. We feel like inner subjects that can use the body as a kind of object. This last impression is an illusion that can be dispelled. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1487-88  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 08:22 AM

Ascriptions of agency do not define the contours of the self in the way that many people seem to believe. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1490-91  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 08:22 AM

A person can fail to distinguish between self-generated and world-generated content, and thereby mistake her own internal imagery for sense data. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1502-5  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 08:24 AM

While mirror self-recognition and use of the personal pronoun seem to emerge at more or less the same time in human development (fifteen to twenty-four months), there are many reasons to believe that self-recognition and selfhood are distinct states of mind—and, therefore, that they differ at the level of brain as well. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1549-53  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 12:09 PM

The experience of sitting in a darkened theater and seeing people interact with one another on the screen is a social encounter of sorts—but it is one in which we, as participants, have been perfectly effaced. This very likely explains why most of us find movies and television so compelling. The moment we turn our eyes to the screen, we are in a social situation that our hominid genes could not have foreseen: We can view the actions of others, along with the minutiae of their facial expressions—even to the point of making eye contact with them—without the slightest risk of being observed ourselves. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1560-62  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 12:10 PM

Ramachandran and others have noted that the discovery of “mirror neurons” offers some support for the idea that the senses of self and other may emerge from the same circuitry in the brain. Some people believe that mirror neurons are also central to our ability to empathize with others and may even account for the emergence of gestural communication and spoken language. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1595-99  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 12:25 PM

As a matter of neurology, the sense of having a persistent and unified self must be an illusion, because it is built upon processes that, by their very nature as processes, are transitory and multifarious. There is no region of the brain that can be the seat of a soul. Everything that makes us human—our emotional lives, capacity for language, the impulses that give rise to complex behavior, and our ability to restrain other impulses that we consider uncivilized—is spread across the entirety of the cortex and many subcortical brain regions as well. The whole brain is involved in making us what we are. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1608-10  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 12:27 PM

How can we know that the conventional sense of self is an illusion? When we look closely, it vanishes. This is compelling in the same way that the disappearance of any illusion is: You thought something was there, but upon closer inspection, you see that it isn’t. What doesn’t survive scrutiny cannot be real. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1684-86  | Added on Wednesday, September 17, 2014, 05:58 PM

We wouldn’t attempt to meditate, or engage in any other contemplative practice, if we didn’t feel that something about our experience needed to be improved. But here lies one of the central paradoxes of spiritual life, because this very feeling of dissatisfaction causes us to overlook the intrinsic freedom of consciousness in the present. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1693-94  | Added on Wednesday, September 17, 2014, 05:59 PM

The ultimate wisdom of enlightenment, whatever it is, cannot be a matter of having fleeting experiences. The goal of meditation is to uncover a form of well-being that is inherent to the nature of our minds. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1736-38  | Added on Thursday, September 18, 2014, 09:23 AM

Many scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is always tied to one of the five senses—and that the idea of a “pure consciousness” apart from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching is a category error and a spiritual fantasy. I am confident that they are mistaken. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1845-46  | Added on Thursday, September 18, 2014, 06:26 PM

I came to Tulku Urgyen yearning for the experience of self-transcendence, and in a few minutes he showed me that I had no self to transcend. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1901-3  | Added on Friday, September 19, 2014, 08:56 AM

Such wanderings of mind are the primary obstacle to meditation. Meditation doesn’t entail the suppression of such thoughts, but it does require that we notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness. In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1911-12  | Added on Friday, September 19, 2014, 08:58 AM

The deeper purpose of meditation is to recognize that which is common to all states of experience, both pleasant and unpleasant. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1922-23  | Added on Friday, September 19, 2014, 09:01 AM

It really is possible to look for the feeling you are calling “I” and to fail to find it in a way that is conclusive. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 1969-72  | Added on Friday, September 19, 2014, 09:11 AM

This illustrates a very common phenomenon in scientific and secular circles: We have a contemplative like Harding who, to the eye of anyone familiar with the experience of self-transcendence, has described it in a manner approaching perfect clarity; we also have a scholar like Hofstadter, a celebrated contributor to our modern understanding of the mind, who dismisses him as a child. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2018-19  | Added on Friday, September 19, 2014, 05:47 PM

It would seem that very few good things in life come from our accepting the present moment as it is. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2035-37  | Added on Friday, September 19, 2014, 05:51 PM

When learning to play a sport like golf, you can immediately establish the abilities of the teacher, and the teacher can, in turn, evaluate your progress without leaving anything to the imagination. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2038-39  | Added on Friday, September 19, 2014, 05:51 PM

The difference between an expert and a novice is no less stark when it comes to recognizing the illusion of the self. But the qualifications of a teacher and the progress of a student are more difficult to assess. 
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The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl, Volumes 1 and 2 (Roald Dahl)
- Highlight on Page 710 | Loc. 10872-73  | Added on Sunday, September 21, 2014, 10:56 PM

It felt something else which we didn’t know about—something called tom or spun or plinuckment, or anything you like.
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2107-8  | Added on Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 09:07 AM

One of the first things one learns in practicing meditation is that nothing is intrinsically boring—indeed, boredom is simply a lack of attention. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2127-28  | Added on Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 09:10 AM

For someone who has not yet succeeded at anything and who probably fears failure, a doctrine that criticizes the search for worldly success can be very appealing. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2265-67  | Added on Thursday, September 25, 2014, 08:46 AM

Of course, there can be clear indications that a teacher is not worth paying attention to. A history as a fabulist or a con artist should be considered fatal; thus, the spiritual opinions of Joseph Smith, Gurdjieff, and L. Ron Hubbard can be safely ignored. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2267-68  | Added on Thursday, September 25, 2014, 08:46 AM

A fetish for numbers is also an ominous sign. Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition—and numerology is where the intellect goes to die. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2265-69  | Added on Thursday, September 25, 2014, 08:47 AM

Of course, there can be clear indications that a teacher is not worth paying attention to. A history as a fabulist or a con artist should be considered fatal; thus, the spiritual opinions of Joseph Smith, Gurdjieff, and L. Ron Hubbard can be safely ignored. A fetish for numbers is also an ominous sign. Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition—and numerology is where the intellect goes to die. Prophecy is also a very strong indication of chicanery or madness on the part of a teacher, and of stupidity among his students. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2286-88  | Added on Thursday, September 25, 2014, 12:05 PM

While I remain open to evidence of psi phenomena—clairvoyance, telepathy, and so forth—the fact that they haven’t been conclusively demonstrated in the lab is a very strong indication that they do not exist. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2292-93  | Added on Thursday, September 25, 2014, 12:06 PM

If one person on earth possessed psychic powers to any significant degree, this would be among the easiest facts to authenticate in a lab. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2292-94  | Added on Thursday, September 25, 2014, 12:07 PM

If one person on earth possessed psychic powers to any significant degree, this would be among the easiest facts to authenticate in a lab. Many people have been duped by traditional evasions on this point; it is often said, for instance, that demonstrating such powers on demand 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2292-96  | Added on Thursday, September 25, 2014, 12:08 PM

If one person on earth possessed psychic powers to any significant degree, this would be among the easiest facts to authenticate in a lab. Many people have been duped by traditional evasions on this point; it is often said, for instance, that demonstrating such powers on demand would be spiritually uncouth and that even to want such empirical evidence is an unflattering sign of doubt on the part of a student. Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe (John 4:48). A lifetime of foolishness and self-deception awaits anyone who won’t call this bluff. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2304-7  | Added on Thursday, September 25, 2014, 12:09 PM

Focusing on scenes of domestic misery, one might easily conclude that the very idea of marriage is flawed and that human beings should find a better way to arrange themselves and to raise children. I think this conclusion would be reckless. Although I have yet to find a spiritual community that appeared worth joining, and signs of trouble are very easy to spot, I have known many people who learned a great deal by spending extended periods of time in the company of one or another spiritual teacher. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2338-39  | Added on Friday, September 26, 2014, 08:11 AM

What is needed to establish the mind’s independence from the brain is a case in which a person has an experience—of anything—without associated brain activity. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2499-2501  | Added on Friday, September 26, 2014, 09:12 AM

The structure of our experiences was similar: We were each given an opportunity to compare a face remembered from a dream/vision with a person (or photo) in the physical world. I realized that the task was hopeless. Alexander believes that he has made the greatest discovery in the history of science. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2510-12  | Added on Friday, September 26, 2014, 09:14 AM

Such is the perennial problem with reports of this kind. Some people are so desperate to interpret the NDE as proof of an afterlife that even those whom one would expect to have a strong commitment to scientific reasoning toss their better judgment out the window. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2514-15  | Added on Friday, September 26, 2014, 09:17 AM

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2518-21  | Added on Friday, September 26, 2014, 09:18 AM

Some drugs of extraordinary power and utility, such as psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well tolerated, and yet one can be sent to prison for their use—whereas drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libitum in almost every society on earth. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2542-48  | Added on Friday, September 26, 2014, 12:31 PM

I have two daughters who will one day take drugs. Of course, I will do everything in my power to see that they choose their drugs wisely, but a life lived entirely without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable. I hope they someday enjoy a morning cup of tea or coffee as much as I do. If they drink alcohol as adults, as they probably will, I will encourage them to do it safely. If they choose to smoke marijuana, I will urge moderation. Tobacco should be shunned, and I will do everything within the bounds of decent parenting to steer them away from it. Needless to say, if I knew that either of my daughters would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or heroin, I might never sleep again. But if they don’t try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in their adult lives, I will wonder whether they had missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2728-30  | Added on Friday, September 26, 2014, 11:19 PM

At its best, religion is a set of stories that recount the ethical and contemplative insights of our wisest ancestors. But these stories come to us bundled with ancient confusion and perennial lies. And they invariably harden into doctrines that defy revision, generation after generation. 
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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 2750-53  | Added on Friday, September 26, 2014, 11:23 PM

Consciousness is simply the light by which the contours of mind and body are known. It is that which is aware of feelings such as joy, regret, amusement, and despair. It can seem to take their shape for a time, but it is possible to recognize that it never quite does. In fact, we can directly experience that consciousness is never improved or harmed by what it knows. Making this discovery, again and again, is the basis of spiritual life. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 2 | Loc. 146-49  | Added on Sunday, October 26, 2014, 03:06 PM

The point is to live lives that are our own creation rather than adapting to the demands of the global marketplace. Existentialism developed this idea by showing that we live with the tension between our cultural heritage and the ability to criticize it; between our desires and our possibilities; and the need to turn the base materials of our lives, which we did not choose, into a life that is truly ours. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 257-60  | Added on Sunday, October 26, 2014, 04:09 PM

in-depth interviews with intercepted suicide bombers by psychologically trained researchers did not find any psychopathology that would allow predicting who will turn into a suicide bomber. If anything, suicide bombing, though extreme, is a manifestation of the depth of the human need for meaning. More than anything, we humans need to feel that we live lives that matter. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 260-62  | Added on Sunday, October 26, 2014, 04:13 PM

The human species at some point in its evolution made a momentous transition, possibly the most dramatic step in the evolution from being merely a more intelligent animal to being distinctly human: our species acquired the notion of death and the realization that each of us will die. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 271-78  | Added on Sunday, October 26, 2014, 04:21 PM

By this Heidegger denoted two related aspects of Dasein: First, humans, whether consciously or not, constantly make choices, and each choice we make prevents other courses of action or life options from being actualized. Second, human existence is characterized by the awareness that it is finite. We know that our time is limited, and that we will die. This immensely heightens the impact of the terminal nature of our choices. Not only did we not actualize some possibilities by choosing to act as we did, but also the finite amount of time we have to live means that we did not have the option of rewinding our lives, so to speak, and trying other options as well. It was one of Heidegger’s seminal insights that awareness of finitude and freedom inevitably generates existential anxiety, which is so difficult to bear that we most of the time fend off this awareness. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 288-91  | Added on Sunday, October 26, 2014, 04:22 PM

The ideas of anthropologist Ernest Becker, particularly his last two books—The Denial of Death (1974) and the posthumously published Escape from Evil (1975)—reformulated some of the core ideas of existentialism in a way closer to evolutionary biology. He argues that evolution has created an impossible situation for the human species. Like all other animals, we are terrified of anything that could lead to our death. But unlike other animal species, we as humans know of our death. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 300-303  | Added on Sunday, October 26, 2014, 04:26 PM

The central tenet of existential psychology is that only an animal that knows time is limited can ask, “Do I live a life worth living?” Only such an animal is preoccupied with the question whether life as a whole is good, valiant, and successful. 8 And this question camouflages the unbearable terror, which is awareness of the passage of time and the reality of death. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 307-10  | Added on Sunday, October 26, 2014, 04:28 PM

Worldviews provide us with what Ernest Becker has called symbolic immortality. Each worldview states that the group and its mission on earth are there to stay beyond our individual death. By contributing to the larger group, its task on earth and its continuity, we feel that something of us will survive our physical death. It also lowers the looming threat of the feeling of being an insignificant speck in a universe that is indifferent to us. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 311-13  | Added on Sunday, October 26, 2014, 04:28 PM

The denial of death is responsible for humankind’s greatest achievements and for some of its most abominable traits. Behavior as diverse as building cathedrals, writing literature, and creating art, but also the initiation of wars and suicide bombings, are all linked to our need to defend ourselves against mortality. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 341-44  | Added on Sunday, October 26, 2014, 05:50 PM

In advanced civilizations self-esteem is mostly no longer a function of beating somebody in direct competition. It is rather that we measure our achievement vis-à-vis a whole culture. The question now arises: What is your field of comparison? What are the criteria according to which you assess your value? What is the group within which you strive for status? To whom do you compare yourself? 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 354-56  | Added on Sunday, October 26, 2014, 06:00 PM

But soon global consciousness became a reality for anyone with cable television. Operation Desert Storm, the first invasion of Iraq in 1991, with its embedded reporters, allowed viewers around the globe to share the experience of the troops that moved into Kuwait and Iraq in real time. It also made clear to everybody that what happens at a point on the globe that many couldn’t even find on the map had powerful implications everywhere. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 354-57  | Added on Sunday, October 26, 2014, 06:00 PM

But soon global consciousness became a reality for anyone with cable television. Operation Desert Storm, the first invasion of Iraq in 1991, with its embedded reporters, allowed viewers around the globe to share the experience of the troops that moved into Kuwait and Iraq in real time. It also made clear to everybody that what happens at a point on the globe that many couldn’t even find on the map had powerful implications everywhere. September 11, 2001, brought this to new heights. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 474-77  | Added on Tuesday, November 04, 2014, 11:28 PM

With the efficient help of Karl Rove, Bush managed to get himself reelected, because his constituency no longer cared about the truth value of his ideas. The age of the golden calf had come to its pinnacle: Ideas and belief systems had become commodities whose value was determined by supply and demand, like any other. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 491-95  | Added on Tuesday, November 04, 2014, 11:32 PM

Here we come to the dark secret of Homo globalis: the same computer monitor that makes creative work so much easier also provides an endless stream of information about the feats of the global world-class, information that invariably impacts Homo globalis’s self-esteem. The mechanism that helped our ancestors not to fight to the death in the struggle for status, giving up and experiencing a mild depression, now becomes the basis of an epidemic. In the global I-Commodity Market each of us is beaten by some spectacular achievement somewhere in the globe thousands of times, daily. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 718-20  | Added on Thursday, November 06, 2014, 12:30 PM

Existential psychology has shown the depth of the human need to matter, make a difference, and feel a significant purpose in this world. We all need to feel that we do something that matters within the frame of reference that defines our experiential world. The question is, what is this frame of reference? 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 35 | Loc. 806-7  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 10:01 PM

Our fear of death, insignificance, and vanishing into nothingness is so tremendous that there are many who are willing to die for the symbolic immortality that heroism bestows on us. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 819-22  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 10:05 PM

Our long-term self-evaluation is a function of being valued in our cultural framework; knowing that who we are and what we do are appreciated; that our work as lawyers, designers, journalists, or physicians is good; that our clients appreciate us; and that we are producing value is a state that becomes part of our self-conception. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 828-30  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 10:09 PM

One of the experiments of existential psychology shows that when we feel we are being valued within our cultural framework, we are less afraid of dying. The reason is that we feel that, like the Greek heroes, our contribution to the larger whole to which we belong, our culture, is leaving a mark—a mark that could possibly outlast our physical lives. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 37 | Loc. 838-39  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 10:10 PM

If everybody could be famous, fame would cease to have any value; and by implication, we know that the vast majority of us will not make it into human consciousness at large. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 39 | Loc. 892-93  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 11:03 PM

The celebrity per se, the social role of those who are primarily famous for being famous, only became possible with mass media—the movie industry and even more through television. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 902-6  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 11:06 PM

there are three factors that help us overcome the terror of mortality: emotionally significant attachments to spouses, parents, children, and friends (a factor not dealt with in this book); a worldview that provides us with an understanding of the world and our place in it, and provides us with meaning; and finally, self-esteem, which is derived from the feedback of our close attachments, our sense that we are living valuable lives as defined in our worldview, and our perception of our place in the world at large. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 914-16  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 11:11 PM

Knowing about people whose physique is not remarkable requires us to remember a lot of information about what they have done and why those things are significant. Knowing the significance of a person’s deed requires the effort of acquiring knowledge as opposed to that recognizing a beautiful face relies on an inborn capacity. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 917-19  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 11:11 PM

The result follows almost inevitably. The infotainment system, by its inner logic, is driven to seek out and develop celebrities standing out through their physical beauty and attractiveness, because this is what will keep the consumers interested. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 920-22  | Added on Wednesday, November 12, 2014, 06:54 PM

Evolution has programmed adults to love babies just for their being, and it is part of the painful losses of growing up that we need to earn love and esteem and that the guaranteed love of infancy can no longer be taken for granted. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 935-38  | Added on Wednesday, November 12, 2014, 06:58 PM

Romanticism was obsessed with the process of artistic creation. Nothing seemed more magical, more special, and almost sanctified than the creation of a great work of art. The artist was endowed with the quality that had been exclusively God’s for millennia of theology: the ability to create something out of nothing, the miracle of creation ex nihilo. My 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 41 | Loc. 935-38  | Added on Wednesday, November 12, 2014, 06:58 PM

Romanticism was obsessed with the process of artistic creation. Nothing seemed more magical, more special, and almost sanctified than the creation of a great work of art. The artist was endowed with the quality that had been exclusively God’s for millennia of theology: the ability to create something out of nothing, the miracle of creation ex nihilo. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 950-52  | Added on Wednesday, November 12, 2014, 07:01 PM

The success of reality television is based on its symbolic significance: its focus is on the process of the magical transformation of a human being from the status of ordinary mortal to the status of demigod. Followed by countless cameras, we can watch the process of transubstantiation—the moment in which a human being is touched by grace. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 993-95  | Added on Wednesday, November 12, 2014, 07:07 PM

Malcolm Gladwell has shown in detail to what extent circumstances of birth, parent’s connections, the coincidence of meeting the right person at the right time, and sheer luck are the ultimate determinants of who will make it to the top and who won’t. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 53 | Loc. 1150-53  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 03:14 PM

The model of the authority of ancient knowledge is problematic nowadays for a number of reasons. For most of human history there was indeed very little well-grounded knowledge of the universe and there was even less systematic knowledge about history and about other cultures. Hence it was much easier for a religion to claim that it was based on the one, true prophet or seer who had received divine revelation. The difficulty of this model became insuperable in the nineteenth century with the advent of modern philology and history. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 53 | Loc. 1161-62  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 03:15 PM

Modernity presented a powerful alternative to the model of ancient knowledge: the story of human history as progress—at least in the domains of knowledge and technology. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 54 | Loc. 1172-74  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 11:48 PM

Quantum physics is one of the New Age gurus’ favorite ploys to undermine the unsuspecting reader’s belief in science. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is invoked to justify anything from the idea that “there is no objective reality” to the claim that “science undermines its own foundations.” 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 1266-69  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:05 AM

The argument that rapture and analytic thought do not mix, which I have heard many times, doesn’t hold water. If this were true, authentic connoisseurs of art would enjoy it less than those who don’t have a clue about art history. Those who have the ability to understand classical music in depth and understand the complex compositional techniques used by the great composers would pay the price of never enjoying Bach, Beethoven, or Mahler as deeply as they did when they understood very little about music. In both cases the opposite is true. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 1266-70  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:05 AM

The argument that rapture and analytic thought do not mix, which I have heard many times, doesn’t hold water. If this were true, authentic connoisseurs of art would enjoy it less than those who don’t have a clue about art history. Those who have the ability to understand classical music in depth and understand the complex compositional techniques used by the great composers would pay the price of never enjoying Bach, Beethoven, or Mahler as deeply as they did when they understood very little about music. In both cases the opposite is true. The more you know about the history of art or music, the more you can enjoy its greatest achievements. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 1277-78  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:06 AM

A body of ideas that loses its power when it is analyzed in depth has something to hide: it is mostly incoherence, with a lack of logic, and lack of evidence. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 62 | Loc. 1365-67  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:20 AM

The phenomenal success of the flat, uninteresting, and morally repugnant The Secret is only the newest edition of the human tendency to fall for those who promise us that we can have everything we want quite simply if we just get this one thing right. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 1392-94  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 10:12 PM

In fact it may precisely be the penchant for tolerance that gets members of Homo globalis caught up in a facile relativism. They would like a world in which everybody gets along with everybody and people don’t kill and don’t die for questions of belief. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 64 | Loc. 1406-8  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 10:13 PM

While it is “in” for liberals and conservatives to accuse each other of the current ills of society and culture, I think that current anti-intellectualism has its sources in both camps, which interacted with each other in a strange dance of synergy that has led our culture to its current level of intellectual shallowness. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1459-60  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 10:21 PM

Between the conservative emphasis on unadulterated faith and the liberal attack on rational thought as an invention of white Western males, the ground for the ideology of political correctness was set. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1509-11  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 12:28 PM

The process of going through illusions and disillusionment, building hopes and revaluing them, acquiring beliefs and discarding them in the light of criticism, and thus acquiring self-knowledge must be an intrinsic value if a liberal society is to flourish. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1522-25  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 12:30 PM

The essence of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was that modern natural science no longer made use of symbolic relations to explain the world. In the sixteenth century an explanation of the sort “there are seven planets because the human body has seven orifices” was perfectly acceptable. The macrocosm and the microcosm were correlated through a nexus of meaning and the human species had a special place in the fabric of the cosmos (literally “order”). 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 73 | Loc. 1526-28  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 12:31 PM

The Copernican revolution and the advent of mathematical physics destroyed the fabric of the anthropocentric cosmos forever. Modern humanity no longer had a privileged place in the world and the meaning of our lives could no longer be derived from the symbolic network that connected the universe’s creator, the structure of the cosmos and human nature. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 73 | Loc. 1526-31  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 12:31 PM

The Copernican revolution and the advent of mathematical physics destroyed the fabric of the anthropocentric cosmos forever. Modern humanity no longer had a privileged place in the world and the meaning of our lives could no longer be derived from the symbolic network that connected the universe’s creator, the structure of the cosmos and human nature. The existential question that arose became: if the universe is indifferent to us, how can we know that we are leading lives of significance? How can we still feel that we have a vocation in this world now that the literal meaning of “vocation” (being called on by God) could no longer be grounded in the new cosmology? 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 74 | Loc. 1546-50  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 12:33 PM

While existentialism is certainly not a light-hearted and optimistic view of human existence, it is not nihilist. Its great claim was that meaning is generated in the attempt to face the tragic structure of our existence: knowing that we will die, we can find our freedom by assuming responsibility for our lives and identities without denying the tension generated between our biological nature and the self-awareness that forces us to ask what it means to live a meaningful life. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 74 | Loc. 1561-63  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 12:36 PM

Thus the theological notion of vocation is given a new interpretation: when the solutions we find to our personal conflicts and tragedies become valuable for others, we can feel that our lives are truly meaningful. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1590-94  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 01:10 PM

Romanticism turned all of us into artists. Living a life worth living now meant to be the author of one’s life. Nietzsche formulated the criterion for judging this creation: it had to be a life with inner, aesthetic coherence. Like all artistic creation, this required judicious use of our aesthetic faculties. Yet there is one central difference between the creation of other works of art and that of living a life. An artist can choose his theme, his motif, and his technique. He can pick from a variety of genres and apply his creativity to this. As opposed to that, in living our lives we cannot choose our base materials. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 1595-1600  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 01:13 PM

We are not self-created. Our physical existence is the result of an act of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman whom we did not choose to be our parents. Our minds are the result of a multiplicity of influences none of which we control. Our genetic inheritance evolves into mental abilities, temperamental traits, and an emotional disposition that is the biological basis of all we will ever think, feel, and experience. Our perspective onto the world is invariably shaped by the language that constitutes the base materials of our minds, the culture that determines our basic outlook on life, and the social class into which we are born. Our character is indelibly shaped by the impact of the personalities of our parents and educators. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 1602-4  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 01:14 PM

This is where the drama of individuality begins. Even though, metaphysically and logically, we could not be the offspring of someone other than our parents, 11 we can feel that we were born into an environment that is recalcitrant rather than nourishing to the development of our personal idiom. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 1609-12  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 01:15 PM

The project of becoming the authors of our lives is an attempt to recreate the aspects of reality that are unbearably fateful, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes in reality. Some people approach this project consciously and deliberately. The self and its life course are shaped in the fashion of a work of art. More often, though, the forces of fate; the desire for authorship; and the multiple layers of pain, desire, anxiety, and rage interact in ways the individual cannot fully decipher. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1621-23  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 01:18 PM

We are the only known animal that has self-consciousness. We do not just exist, but we have a relationship to our selves and our lives. Our identity is not simply a given; it is also the result of our decisions, and thus, to some extent of our making. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1630-33  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 01:19 PM

This sets the stage for the drama of human existence and human individuality. Humans are endowed with two abilities that, to the best of our knowledge, are unique in the animal kingdom. The first is that we have self-consciousness. We know that we exist, we have a conception of ourselves, and we have an attitude toward who we are. The second is that we are endowed with an imagination fertile and active enough to be able to imagine that things could have been different. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1688-90  | Added on Thursday, November 20, 2014, 01:43 PM

Our existential equation is who we are . The fulfilled life is not one in which the existential equation is solved, but a life in which the existential equation is lived out fruitfully and creatively. The resolution of this equation can only mean death. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1776-79  | Added on Friday, November 21, 2014, 10:35 PM

An existentialist view of life suggests something very different. A life well lived is a life in which an individual’s existential equation is most fully lived. Of course we hope that people learn from their mistakes; we hope that they find ways to live the conflicts and tensions that define them in ways that are creative rather than destructive, and that such creativity enhances both their well-being and their contribution to the world. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 90 | Loc. 1903  | Added on Monday, November 24, 2014, 09:39 PM

Hence a person’s relation to her Sosein can be the source of both endless suffering and a sense of achievement and meaning. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 2191-93  | Added on Thursday, November 27, 2014, 09:57 PM

The crucial step is to accept that to become the author of our lives, we need to accept that we haven’t chosen the base materials of who we are. We can only choose to shape them with clear view of our strength and weaknesses, as Nietzsche says. This process, like stretching, involves pain and requires discipline. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 106 | Loc. 2257-59  | Added on Monday, December 01, 2014, 05:05 PM

As I have argued in the past, the human psyche is endowed with an imaginative core that refuses to accept that the world does not suit our deepest needs and desires. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 2283-85  | Added on Monday, December 01, 2014, 05:11 PM

There is indeed a certain change to be observed when, at midlife, mortality becomes more salient. Yet along with Becker we need to refrain from saying that this simply means that death becomes an accepted fact. The ontological protest of subjectivity never quite lets us acquiesce in mortality. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 2287-88  | Added on Monday, December 01, 2014, 05:11 PM

This difference is not just semantic; it implies that mortality acceptance is not an either-or affair but moves on a continuum between manic denial and the ability of calm contemplation. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 2300-2303  | Added on Monday, December 01, 2014, 10:00 PM

In fact it may not be unreasonable to hypothesize that at midlife the need to create something that will create a lasting legacy acquires urgency, because the reality of death becomes more tangible. As a result, life as a whole, in many cases, becomes more focused. Anything that detracts from the central goal of creating a lasting legacy is called into question. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 2441-43  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 10:07 PM

Handy began to sculpt his life in the way Michelangelo describes the process of sculpture: chipping away the superfluous pieces. He pared it down to the essentials. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 2471-74  | Added on Sunday, December 07, 2014, 10:49 PM

Becker’s theory leads to the following interpretation: the event that increases mortality awareness leads to an increased need for some type of defense that strengthens the human denial of death. For a particular group of people the most effective defense is immersion in a process of creation that is fed by the hope that its result will outlive its creator. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 2502-3  | Added on Sunday, December 07, 2014, 10:59 PM

Through ongoing research for more than thirty years, Csikszentmihalyi has come to the conclusion that flow is the state that is most highly correlated with a general feeling of happiness. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2507-8  | Added on Sunday, December 07, 2014, 11:00 PM

Paring life down to the essentials and focusing on creation serves two functions: it liberates us from awareness of self and time and it allows us to be immersed in an activity that we experience as intrinsically meaningful. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2513-15  | Added on Sunday, December 07, 2014, 11:02 PM

Most of all, we need to drop the mistaken notion that freedom consists of a lack of limitations. Paring life down to the essentials requires the commitment to a few central themes that will be the major source of meaning in our lives. Such commitment means that we accept that there will be many things we won’t do in our lives. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2523-24  | Added on Sunday, December 07, 2014, 11:03 PM

We cannot center our lives around a theme without having a worldview that tells us what is important, truly valuable, and what is nothing but a distraction that must not tie up our energies. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 2569-71  | Added on Monday, December 08, 2014, 10:10 PM

In a way quite rare in the social sciences that generally need to cope with rather ambiguous experimental results, the predictions of EEP work like a Swiss precision watch. Invariably, the group exposed to death thoughts becomes more judgmental, more stereotypical, and less accepting of otherness. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 126 | Loc. 2643-45  | Added on Tuesday, December 09, 2014, 10:58 PM

Minds fed on intellectual junk, incapable of judging ideas on intellectual merit rather than popularity, are no more resistant to infection by noxious memes than a body fed on junk food and untrained by exercise is capable of dealing with physical exertion. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 2832-34  | Added on Wednesday, December 17, 2014, 01:06 PM

But pluralism does not entail relativism. Relativism asserts that contradictory positions can be equally true. A somewhat weaker version of relativism maintains that there is no way to argue for or against a thesis, a worldview, or a theory and that all worldviews are therefore equal in value. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 2844-47  | Added on Wednesday, December 17, 2014, 01:11 PM

Berlin’s value pluralism claims that there is no perfect solution for how to live because we will always have to make choices between competing values. But yet again, this does not mean that ethical and political worldviews cannot be discussed reasonably and that there are no better or worse social and political arrangements; value pluralism does not entail relativism. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 2856-57  | Added on Wednesday, December 17, 2014, 01:15 PM

We are not condemned to live within the bounds of worldviews that we didn’t choose but were implanted in our minds through early education. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2875-78  | Added on Saturday, December 20, 2014, 10:59 PM

These philosophical parables emphasize that humans are prone to live in error, because the circumstances of our birth may not have given us the type of education that gives us access to the best thinking that humanity has produced. All philosophical traditions exhort us not to acquiesce to the limitations imposed on us by accident of birth and to make the painful effort of acquiring the knowledge necessary to live in a worldview as close to the truth as possible. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 2926-27  | Added on Saturday, December 20, 2014, 11:07 PM

My personal experience therefore is that escaping the Platonic cave is a process that never ends and that we must always be prepared to rethink and possibly abandon beliefs no matter how cherished they may be. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 2926-29  | Added on Saturday, December 20, 2014, 11:07 PM

My personal experience therefore is that escaping the Platonic cave is a process that never ends and that we must always be prepared to rethink and possibly abandon beliefs no matter how cherished they may be. And while this process can, at times, be painful, it is also one of the most sustaining and nourishing activities that humans can engage in—as philosophers from Plato to Michel Foucault have argued for millennia. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 3144-46  | Added on Sunday, December 21, 2014, 10:10 AM

Atheists and agnostics account for about 12 to 15 percent, but this is a problematic estimate because it is difficult to get data about the real situation in China; the actual number may be smaller. Only Europe has a well-documented substantial proportion of agnostics and atheists. 2 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 3146-49  | Added on Sunday, December 21, 2014, 10:12 AM

From the point of view of existential psychology, it is not surprising that religion has remained so enormously powerful. Given that defending against death anxiety is, psychologically speaking, the most important function of worldviews, religion has a huge advantage on secular meaning-systems. Most religions, particularly the great monotheistic religions, promise the believer that our individual, physical death is not truly our end: we will survive one way or another. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 3150-51  | Added on Sunday, December 21, 2014, 10:12 AM

Religions are, in any case, the most efficient forms of the denial of 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 3150-51  | Added on Sunday, December 21, 2014, 10:12 AM

Religions are, in any case, the most efficient forms of the denial of death. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 3151-53  | Added on Sunday, December 21, 2014, 10:13 AM

Existential psychology provides a strong rationale for the assumption that the European Enlightenment’s prediction during the nineteenth century that the rule of religion would one day be replaced by secular ideologies based on science is unlikely to come true. The human need to deny death is too powerful. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 3158-60  | Added on Monday, December 22, 2014, 11:26 PM

This ideology failed because it was a profoundly inauthentic prescription: it is humanly impossible to genuinely respect beliefs no matter how irrational, immoral, or absurd. The resulting culture was emotionally frozen and often did not lead to fruitful discussion between worldviews in general, and between secularism and religion in particular. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 3162-64  | Added on Monday, December 22, 2014, 11:26 PM

The difference between civilized disdain and political correctness is that the former allows one to feel disdain for a person’s or group’s views or beliefs while maintaining respect for the human beings that hold them. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 153 | Loc. 3224-29  | Added on Monday, December 22, 2014, 11:39 PM

The findings of existential psychology are pertinent to the question of how to deal with the conflict between science and religion. As we have seen when people’s belief systems are attacked, the result is inevitably that they dig more deeply into the trenches of their worldview. Even if you agree with Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens that liberalism should no longer tolerate attacks while being sensitive toward the feelings of the religiously inclined; no rational person can expect that their polemic will convince the religious to leave their creed, certainly not after the data produced by existential psychology. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 154 | Loc. 3247-53  | Added on Monday, December 22, 2014, 11:41 PM

But let us not delude ourselves: the value of these books is to raise the spirits of liberal atheists who had been made to feel that they had no right to fight for their views. These spirited counterattacks certainly succeeded in reestablishing some esprit de corps of those committed to Enlightenment values and the scientific worldview. But the primary effect of such aggressive rhetoric is primarily to rally our side. We should not think that all-out attacks on religion will convert anybody. The scientific evidence shows that the opposite is likely to be true. Hence the frontal attack on religion may have the positive effect of lifting the spirits of secularists who have felt on the defensive for years, but it certainly is not a fruitful strategy to solve the world’s problems, as they will only reach the converted at best and outrage those criticized at worst. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 156 | Loc. 3302-6  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 08:34 AM

We should be able to marvel at the variety of collectively created fictions invented to provide meaning to human life rather than thundering at those we like least. Of course anti-theists and religious believers will continue to disdain each other’s worldviews, which is fine as long as it doesn’t turn into a matter of life and death. Civilized and cheerful disdain could provide a model for all ideologies—religious and secular—by replacing bilious self-righteousness with laughter; and it could make us see human history as something more akin to a contest for best collective work of fiction than to a mortal clash of civilizations. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 157 | Loc. 3308-11  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 08:37 AM

Tolerance is full-fledged acceptance of a point of view, group, or ideology. Toleration is the state of affairs in which we say that we are willing to tolerate a point of view, religion, or political attitude even though we condemn it. Toleration demands nothing more from us than to feel that we can live with a certain form of life or worldview in our society, even though we find it primitive, immoral, and reprehensible. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 3349-50  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 08:48 AM

Instead of faking mutual respect, why don’t we settle for civilized disdain?” 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 160 | Loc. 3387-89  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 08:54 AM

To feel anger, hurt, and disdain without violence and to maintain communication with those whose views we do not respect and who do not respect ours are the basis for the type of world citizenship that has become a vital necessity in a globally interconnected world. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 3474-76  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 07:22 PM

Freedom of the mind is not a religious principle; it is a principle of various Enlightenment movements from India through Greece to eighteenth-century Europe, and this principle historically and philosophically clashes with the principle of the superiority of faith. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 166 | Loc. 3516-21  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 07:29 PM

The evolutionary psychology of religion, based on a wealth of anthropological and experimental data, is based on two major findings. 27 One is that we humans are hardwired to overdetect intentional agents. We see a shadow in the woods and tend to overinterpret it as either animal or human. This is often called the “hyperactive agent detector device” or HADD, because it leads to many false positives. The reason the hardwired HADD was advantageous in an evolutionary sense is simple: under jungle conditions, false positives are better than false negatives because they alert us to the possibility of dangerous predators, and a single false negative can be lethal. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 166 | Loc. 3523-24  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 07:29 PM

In other words, our brain is biologically programmed not for science but for religion. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 166 | Loc. 3527-28  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 07:30 PM

As opposed to human agents, the gods can know whether we really live according to our society’s rules or not. Hence belief in gods binds the members of a society together with very strong ties indeed. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 3532-34  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 07:31 PM

This is the source of the age-old conflict between religion and science. Science, the open-minded investigation of laws of nature, invariably leads to naturalistic explanations of human events. There were good reasons, therefore, why religions have been hostile to science, because it undermines the cognitive and ethical foundations of religion. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 3539-42  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 07:32 PM

Epicurus was part of the Greek Enlightenment. He believed that true freedom was not possible as long as humans are afraid of the gods. Only when we understand that the world is ruled by blind natural law can we finally begin to live our lives rationally and be free or experience eudaemonia (“human flourishing,” often misleadingly translated as “happiness”). 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 3546-49  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 07:33 PM

The Epicurean tradition points to a deep logical mistake engrained in human psychology. We tend to try to imagine what it would be like to be dead. We do so even if we don’t believe in an afterlife. In doing so we imagine being dead and what it would feel like. But this involves a contradiction in terms: when we are dead (assuming that there is no afterlife and this is not the issue) there is no thinking or feeling subject that can feel anything. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 3554-56  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 07:34 PM

Lucretius argues that none of us is saddened by the fact that there was an infinite time span before we were born in which we didn’t exist. Why should it sadden us that there will be an infinite time span after we die in which we will not exist? Why should the infinity of time before we were born be less of a reason to mourn than the infinity of time after we die? 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 3557-60  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 07:34 PM

I don’t think that anybody today truly expects the Epicurean arguments to completely abolish the human fear of death. Most of this fear is not rationally based. It is part of our evolutionary heritage that like all animals we are terrorized by anything that threatens our lives. This terror of death is an evolutionary necessity since no animal that doesn’t try avoiding death would survive long enough to reproduce. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 3570-72  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 07:36 PM

The most destructive manifestations of fanaticism in recent history (i.e., suicide and terror attacks) are to be explained by the denial of death. Even physical death, to the fanatic, is preferable to accepting our mortality, paradoxical as this may sound. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 169 | Loc. 3576-77  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 08:48 PM

It is, I think, utterly impossible to be Epicurean and to be a fanatic, for the deepest root of fanaticism is the denial of death. On 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 169 | Loc. 3576-77  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 08:48 PM

It is, I think, utterly impossible to be Epicurean and to be a fanatic, for the deepest root of fanaticism is the denial of death. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 3605-7  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 08:56 PM

The world citizenship I am talking about is of a very different sort. It is based on the realization that globalization has led to the point where there is no longer a space on earth that is outside civilization and that political consciousness can no longer be restricted to one country, culture, or religion and thus needs to address the fate of humanity as a whole. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 3760-64  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 09:20 PM

The Temple Mount is the epicenter of a murderous fanaticism that is keeping the world on its toes. It is the embodiment of all the deleterious effects of worldview defense against death awareness. It shows the catastrophic impact of the need to cling to a worldview that provides symbolic immortality to its most extreme manifestations: the willingness to kill and, even more paradoxically, to die for it. Is the effect of worldviews invariably deleterious at best and catastrophic at worst? 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 3760-63  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 09:20 PM

The Temple Mount is the epicenter of a murderous fanaticism that is keeping the world on its toes. It is the embodiment of all the deleterious effects of worldview defense against death awareness. It shows the catastrophic impact of the need to cling to a worldview that provides symbolic immortality to its most extreme manifestations: the willingness to kill and, even more paradoxically, to die for it. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 3781-82  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 09:23 PM

The history of totalitarianism in the twentieth century makes clear beyond any doubt that the line between open and closed worldviews does not run along the boundary between religious and secular worldviews. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 3837-39  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 09:33 PM

Berlin showed the possibility of accepting the historical contingency of one’s own position without falling into cynicism. His ability to stick to his beliefs without being dogmatic about them may indeed be one of the marks of the civilized mind and “the ultimate test of character for the individual.” 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 183 | Loc. 3849-52  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 09:35 PM

As infants we did not know about the world’s vastness or its dangers. We were protected from it by humans whose powers seemed unlimited. Our caretakers provided us with all that we needed and we had no idea about what it took for them to do so. It seemed to depend on nothing but their will on whether we would receive food, shelter, and comfort. Freud’s argument was that this experience, while not consciously remembered, leaves an indelible mark on our unconscious and we are left with a lifelong yearning for unbounded protection. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 185 | Loc. 3886-89  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 09:39 PM

Well-meaning liberals who believe that any worldview that is too different from theirs is a pathological reaction to Western misdeeds are empirically wrong and ideologically misguided. Reducing such belief systems to psychopathology is a form of naiveté, as it assumes that any worldview that doesn’t correspond can be brushed aside as nothing but a reaction to some grievances and fails to realize that the human mind is prone to the seduction of closed worldviews. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 185 | Loc. 3892-94  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 09:41 PM

And we will continue our disagreement about these questions in trenchant argument and enjoy the civilized disdain we feel toward each other because between open worldviews there is, in principle, never a need to resort to violence, because dialogue remains a possibility. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 3955-58  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 09:50 PM

Humankind seems to be at a fascinating, exhilarating, and totally frightening crossroads. We are the onlookers to a race between the sheer inertia of humanity’s destroying the planet’s resources, and the emergence of sufficient collective understanding of the fact that we need to change course to survive. 
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The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century (Carlo Strenger)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 4017-21  | Added on Tuesday, December 23, 2014, 09:57 PM

And yet the temptation to write, “Members of Homo globalis of all nations, unite!” is too great to resist. Maybe the pooled creativity of those who understand that humankind has been united by fate, if not by design and intelligence, will carry the day once more; not by competing with other species and erasing them, but by creating a new form of solidarity of the human species that, by blind chance, has reached both the abysses of genocide and environmental havoc and the heights of individual and collective creation that surpass anything our scarred globe has ever seen. 
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Gargantua (Rabelais)
- Highlight Loc. 3602-3  | Added on Wednesday, February 04, 2015, 12:28 PM

Puis alloit es lieux secretz faire excretion des digestions naturelles. Là son precepteur repetoit ce que avoit esté leu, luy exposant les poinctz plus obscurs et difficiles.
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Gargantua (Rabelais)
- Highlight Loc. 4379-80  | Added on Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 12:23 PM

Ainsi, par sa prouesse, feurent desconfiz tous ceulx de l’année qui estoient entrez dedans le clous, jusques au nombre de treze mille six cens vingt et deux, sans les femmes et petitz enfans, cela s’entend tousjours.
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Stupeur et tremblements (Nothomb Amélie)
- Highlight Loc. 714-16  | Added on Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 10:21 AM

Enfin et surtout parce qu'une beauté qui a résisté à tant de corsets physiques et mentaux, à tant de contraintes, d'écrasements, d'interdits absurdes, de dogmes, d'asphyxie, de désolations, de sadisme, de conspiration du silence et d'humiliations, une telle beauté, donc, est un miracle d'héroïsme.
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Stupeur et tremblements (Nothomb Amélie)
- Highlight Loc. 937-38  | Added on Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 10:39 AM

L'honneur consiste le plus souvent à être idiot. Et ne vaut-il pas mieux se conduire comme une imbécile que se déshonorer ?
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Stupeur et tremblements (Nothomb Amélie)
- Highlight Loc. 1261-63  | Added on Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 11:02 AM

Comme l'a remarqué le commun des mortels, les toilettes sont un endroit propice à la méditation. Pour moi qui y étais devenue carmélite, ce fut l'occasion de réfléchir. Et j'y compris une grande chose : c'est qu'au Japon, l'existence, c'est l'entreprise.
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Stupeur et tremblements (Nothomb Amélie)
- Highlight Loc. 1420-21  | Added on Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 11:17 AM

Ce constat me rappela le mot d'André Maurois : "Ne dites pas trop de mal de vous-même : on vous croirait."
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 43-45  | Added on Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 04:19 PM

Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 63-65  | Added on Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 04:20 PM

Drug companies around the world have produced some of the most amazing innovations of the past fifty years, saving lives on an epic scale. But that does not allow them to hide data, mislead doctors and harm patients. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 152-53  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:49 PM

industry-funded trials are more likely to produce a positive, flattering result than independently-funded trials. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 158-59  | Added on Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 01:50 PM

85 per cent of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50 per cent of the government-funded trials were. That’s a very significant difference. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 213-16  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 01:40 PM

In fact, it is so deep-rooted that even if we fixed it today – right now, for good, forever, without any flaws or loopholes in our legislation – that still wouldn’t help, because we would still be practising medicine, cheerfully making decisions about which treatment is best, on the basis of decades of medical evidence which is – as you’ve now seen – fundamentally distorted. But there is a way ahead. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 240-42  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 01:43 PM

In the published data, reboxetine was a safe and effective drug. In reality, it was no better than a sugar pill, and worse, it does more harm than good. As a doctor I did something which, on the balance of all the evidence, harmed my patient, simply because unflattering data was left unpublished. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 250-51  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 01:45 PM

Evidence is the only way we can possibly know if something works – or doesn’t work – in medicine. We proceed by testing things, as cautiously as we can, in head-to-head trials, and gathering together all of the evidence. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 293-95  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 01:51 PM

When we don’t share the results of basic research, such as a small first-in-man study, we expose people to unnecessary risks in the future. Was this an extreme case? Is the problem limited 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 293-94  | Added on Thursday, April 02, 2015, 01:51 PM

When we don’t share the results of basic research, such as a small first-in-man study, we expose people to unnecessary risks in the future. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 350-51  | Added on Monday, April 13, 2015, 06:46 PM

It may sound like a simple idea, but systematic reviews are extremely rare outside clinical medicine, and are quietly one of the most important and transgressive ideas of the past forty years. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 443-44  | Added on Monday, April 13, 2015, 08:11 PM

Francis Bacon explained in 1620 that we often mislead ourselves by only remembering the times something worked, and forgetting those when it didn’t. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 470-72  | Added on Monday, April 13, 2015, 08:17 PM

There was one clear thing we should do about this: start a registry of all clinical trials, demand that people register their study before they start, and insist that they publish the results at the end. That was 1986. Since then, a generation later, we have done very badly. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 524-28  | Added on Monday, April 13, 2015, 08:31 PM

The most current systematic review on publication bias, from 2010, from which the examples above are taken, draws together the evidence from various fields. 29 Twelve comparable studies follow up conference presentations, and taken together they find that a study with a significant finding is 1.62 times more likely to be published. For the four studies taking lists of trials from before they started, overall, significant results were 2.4 times more likely to be published. Those are our best estimates of the scale of the problem. They are current, and they are damning. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 590-95  | Added on Tuesday, April 21, 2015, 10:28 PM

In fact, the cost of proving that a finding was wrong is vastly greater than the cost of making it in the first place, because you need to run the experiment many more times to prove the absence of a finding, simply because of the way that the statistics of detecting weak effects work; and you also need to be absolutely certain that you’ve excluded all technical problems, to avoid getting egg on your face if your replication turns out to have been inadequate. These barriers to refutation may partly explain why it’s so easy to get away with publishing findings that ultimately turn out to be wrong. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 603-4  | Added on Tuesday, April 21, 2015, 10:31 PM

We should give more incentives to academics for publishing negative results; but we should also give them more opportunity. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 679-81  | Added on Monday, April 27, 2015, 09:50 PM

We will see that many of the very people and organisations we would have expected to protect patients from the harm inflicted by missing data have, instead, shirked their responsibilities; and worse than that, we will see that many of them have actively conspired in helping companies to withhold data from patients. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 690-91  | Added on Monday, April 27, 2015, 09:59 PM

patients are specifically told when they sign up to participate that the data will be used to inform future decisions. If this isn’t true, and the data can be withheld at the whim of a researcher or a company, then the patients have been actively lied to. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 695-97  | Added on Monday, April 27, 2015, 10:01 PM

it is entirely normal for researchers and academics conducting industry-funded trials to sign contracts subjecting them to gagging clauses which forbid them to publish, discuss or analyse data from the trials they have conducted, without the permission of the funder. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 923-26  | Added on Saturday, May 02, 2015, 06:24 PM

So that, in total, is why I regard the ICMJE, the FDA and the EU’s claims to have addressed this problem as ‘fake fixes’. In fact, they have done worse than fail: they have given false reassurance that the problem has been fixed, false reassurance that it has gone away, and they have led us to take our eyes off the ball. For half a decade now, people in medicine and academia have talked about publication bias as if it was yesterday’s problem, discovered in the 1990s and early 2000s, and swiftly fixed. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 1052-55  | Added on Saturday, May 02, 2015, 08:57 PM

The output of a regulator is often simply a crude, brief summary: almost a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ about side effects. This is the opposite of science, which is only reliable because everyone shows their working, explains how they know that something is effective or safe, shares their methods and their results, and allows others to decide if they agree with the way they processed and analysed the data. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 1619-23  | Added on Saturday, May 02, 2015, 10:29 PM

The field of missing data is a tragic and strange one. We have tolerated the emergence of a culture in medicine where information is routinely withheld, and we have blinded ourselves to the unnecessary suffering and death that follows from this. The people we should have been able to trust to handle all this behind the scenes – the regulators, the politicians, the senior academics, the patient organisations, the professional bodies, the universities, the ethics committees – have almost all failed us. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 1701-2  | Added on Saturday, May 02, 2015, 11:17 PM

At this moment you might be thinking: what kind of reckless maniac gives their only body over for an experiment like this? I’m inclined to agree. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 1701-2  | Added on Wednesday, May 06, 2015, 01:39 PM

At this moment you might be thinking: what kind of reckless maniac gives their only body over for an experiment like this? I’m inclined to agree. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 1727-28  | Added on Wednesday, May 06, 2015, 01:41 PM

Participants generally have few economic alternatives, especially in the US, and are frequently presented with lengthy and impenetrable consent forms, which are hard to navigate and understand. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2075-77  | Added on Saturday, May 09, 2015, 11:59 PM

This raises several serious problems, the first of which is ethical. It’s obviously wrong to put patients in a trial where half of them will be given a placebo, if there is a currently available option which is known to be effective, because you are actively depriving half of your patients of treatment for their disease. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2147-48  | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015, 12:09 AM

When you come to get your drug approved to go on the market, regulators will often permit you to show proof of effectiveness only on surrogate outcomes. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2163-65  | Added on Sunday, May 10, 2015, 12:12 AM

For many decades, for example, the FDA’s performance was measured by how many drugs it managed to approve in each calendar year. 25 This led to a phenomenon known as the ‘December Effect’, whereby a very large proportion of the year’s approvals were rushed through in a panic during the last few weeks around Christmas. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2253-54  | Added on Monday, May 11, 2015, 09:38 PM

This personal testimony was in all likelihood a combination of the placebo effect and the natural fluctuation in symptoms that all patients experience. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2271-72  | Added on Monday, May 11, 2015, 09:40 PM

Accelerated approval is not used to get urgent drugs to market for emergency use and rapid assessment. Follow-up studies are not done. These accelerated approval programmes are a smokescreen. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2276-77  | Added on Monday, May 11, 2015, 09:41 PM

One thing is clear from all the stories in this book: drug companies respond rationally to incentives, and when those incentives are unhelpful, so are drug companies. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2377-79  | Added on Monday, May 11, 2015, 09:54 PM

The most expensive doctors in the world don’t know any better than anyone else, since any trained person can critically read the best systematic reviews on a given drug, what it will do to your life expectancy, and there is no hack, no workaround, for this broken system. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2473-74  | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 09:28 PM

database studies give us information on what drugs do in real-world patients, under real-world conditions 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2516-20  | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 09:51 PM

When it comes to the secrecy of regulators, it is clear that there is an important cultural issue that needs to be resolved. I’ve spent some time trying to understand the perspective of public servants who are clearly good people, but still seem to think that hiding documents from the public is desirable. The best I can manage is this: regulators believe that decisions about drugs are best made by them, behind closed doors; and that as long as they make good decisions, it is OK for these to then be communicated only in summary form to the outside world. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2524-28  | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 09:55 PM

A regulator is deciding whether it’s in the interests of society overall that a particular drug should ever be available for use in its country, even if only in some very obscure circumstance, such as when all other drugs have failed. Doctors, meanwhile, are making a decision about whether they should use this drug right now, for the patient in front of them. Both are using the safety and efficacy data to which they have access, but they both need access to it in full, in order to make their very different decisions. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2531-32  | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 09:56 PM

regulators frequently approve drugs that are only vaguely effective, with serious side effects, on the off-chance that they might be useful to someone, somewhere, when other interventions aren’t an option. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2606-11  | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 10:27 PM

Drugs are approved on weak evidence, showing no benefit over existing treatments, and sometimes no benefit at all. This gives us a market flooded with drugs that aren’t very good. We then fail to collect better evidence on them once they’re available, even when we have legislative power to force companies to do better trials, and even when they’ve promised to do so. Lastly, side-effects data is gathered in a slightly ad hoc fashion, behind closed doors, with secret documents and ‘risk management plans’ that are hidden from doctors and patients for no good reason. The results of this safety monitoring are communicated inconsistently, through mechanisms that are uninformative and are therefore used infrequently, and which are, in any case, vulnerable to spectacular delays imposed by drug companies. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2622-23  | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 10:36 PM

Drug companies should be required to provide data showing how their new drug compares against the best currently available treatment, for every new drug, before it comes onto the market. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2625-26  | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 10:36 PM

Regulators and healthcare funders should use their influence to force companies to produce more informative trials. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2633-35  | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 10:37 PM

All information about safety and efficacy that passes between regulators and drug companies should be in the public domain, as should all data held by national and international bodies about adverse events on medications, unless there are significant privacy concerns on individual patient records. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2641-42  | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 10:38 PM

We should aim to create a better market for communicating the risks and benefits of medications. The output of regulators is stuffy, legalistic and impenetrable, and reflects the interests of regulators, not patients or doctors. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2645-47  | Added on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 10:39 PM

we need more trials. Wherever there is true uncertainty about which treatment is best, we should simply compare them, see which is best at treating a condition, and which has worse side effects. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2719-21  | Added on Sunday, May 17, 2015, 07:21 PM

So, fraud: it happens, it’s not clever, it’s just criminal, and is perpetrated by bad people. But its total contribution to error in the medical literature is marginal when compared to the routine, sophisticated and – more than anything – plausibly deniable everyday methodological distortions which fill this book. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2725-27  | Added on Monday, May 18, 2015, 09:49 PM

As we have seen, patients in trials are often nothing like real patients seen by doctors in everyday clinical practice. Because these ‘ideal’ patients are more likely to get better, they exaggerate the benefits of drugs, and help expensive new medicines appear to be more cost effective than they really are. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2785-87  | Added on Monday, May 18, 2015, 09:49 PM

Drugs are often compared with something that’s not very good. We’ve already seen this in companies preferring to test their drugs against a dummy placebo sugar pill that contains no medicine, as this sets the bar very low. But it is also common to see trials where a new drug is compared with a competitor that is known to be pretty useless; or with a good competitor, but at a stupidly low dose, or a stupidly high dose. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2818-22  | Added on Monday, May 18, 2015, 09:50 PM

Trials are often brief, as we have seen, because companies need to get results as quickly as possible, in order to make their drug look good while it is still in patent, and owned by them. This raises several problems, including ones that we have already reviewed: specifically, people using ‘surrogate outcomes’, like changes in blood tests, instead of ‘real-world outcomes’, like changes in heart attack rates, which take longer to emerge. But brief trials can also distort the benefits of a drug simply by virtue of their brevity, if the short-term effects are different to the long-term ones. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2844-47  | Added on Monday, May 18, 2015, 09:53 PM

If you stop a trial early, or late, because you were peeking at the results as it went along, you increase the chances of getting a favourable result. This is because you are exploiting the random variation that exists in the data. It is a sophisticated version of the way someone can increase their chances of winning in a coin toss by using this strategy: ‘Damn! OK, best of three…Damn! Best of five?…Damn! OK, best of seven…’ 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2890-92  | Added on Monday, May 18, 2015, 09:58 PM

sometimes a trial can be prolonged for entirely valid reasons, but sometimes, prolonging a trial – or including the results from a follow-up period after it – can dilute important findings, and make them harder to see. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2947-49  | Added on Wednesday, May 20, 2015, 10:19 PM

A small trial is fine, if your drug is consistently life-saving in a condition that is consistently fatal. But you need a large trial to detect a small difference between two treatments; and you need a very large trial to be confident that two drugs are equally effective. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2973-75  | Added on Wednesday, May 20, 2015, 10:23 PM

Blood tests are easy to measure, and often respond very neatly to a dose of a drug; but patients care more about whether they are suffering, or dead, than they do about the numbers printed on a lab report. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 2987-90  | Added on Wednesday, May 20, 2015, 10:24 PM

Sometimes, the way you package up your outcome data can give misleading results. For example, by setting your thresholds just right, you can turn a modest benefit into an apparently dramatic one. And by bundling up lots of different outcomes, to make one big ‘composite outcome’, you can dilute harms; or allow freak results on uninteresting outcomes to make it look as if a whole group of outcomes are improved. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3032-33  | Added on Wednesday, May 20, 2015, 10:37 PM

There is a terrifying reality revealed by this study: rumours, oversimplifications and wishful thinking can spread through the academic literature, just as easily as they do through any internet discussion forum. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3035-37  | Added on Wednesday, May 20, 2015, 10:37 PM

Sometimes patients leave a trial altogether, often because they didn’t like the drug they were on. But when you analyse the two groups in your trial you have to make sure you analyse all the patients assigned to a treatment. Otherwise you overstate the benefits of your drug. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3049-51  | Added on Wednesday, May 20, 2015, 10:39 PM

You’re going to use the results of a trial to inform your decision about whether to ‘give someone some tablets’, not ‘force some tablets down their throat compulsorily’. So you want the results to be from an analysis that looks at people according to what they were given by their doctor, rather than what they actually swallowed. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3062-65  | Added on Wednesday, May 20, 2015, 10:41 PM

If you measure a dozen outcomes in your trial, but cite an improvement in any one of them as a positive result, then your results are meaningless. Our tests for deciding if a result is statistically significant assume that you are only measuring one outcome. By measuring a dozen, you have given yourself a dozen chances of getting a positive result, rather than one, without clearly declaring that. Your study is biased by design, and is likely to find more positive results than there really are. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3120-23  | Added on Thursday, May 21, 2015, 02:19 PM

To be clear: if you switch your pre-specified primary outcome between the beginning and the end of your trial, without a very good explanation for why you’ve done so, then you’re simply not doing science properly. Your study is broken by design. It should be a universal requirement that all studies report their pre-specified primary outcome as the primary outcome. This should be enforced by all journals, and things should have been done this way since trials began. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3145-47  | Added on Thursday, May 21, 2015, 02:22 PM

If your drug didn’t win overall in your trial, you can chop up the data in lots of different ways, to try and see if it won in a subgroup: maybe it works brilliantly in Chinese men between fifty-six and seventy-one. This is as stupid as playing ‘Best of three…Best of five…’ And yet it is commonplace. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3211-14  | Added on Thursday, May 21, 2015, 02:30 PM

You can draw a net around a group of trials, by selectively quoting them, and make a drug seem more effective than it really is. When you do this on one use of one drug, it’s obvious what you’re doing. But you can also do it within a whole clinical research programme, and create a confusion that nobody yet feels able to contain. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3243-44  | Added on Thursday, May 21, 2015, 09:57 PM

Sometimes, trials aren’t really trials: they’re viral marketing projects, designed to get as many doctors prescribing the new drug as possible, with tiny numbers of participants from large numbers of clinics. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3301-2  | Added on Thursday, May 21, 2015, 10:05 PM

At the end of your trial, if your result is unimpressive, you can exaggerate it in the way that you present the numbers; and if you haven’t got a positive result at all, you can just spin harder. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3328-29  | Added on Thursday, May 21, 2015, 10:07 PM

Research has shown that if you present benefits as a relative risk reduction, people are more likely to choose an intervention. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3364-66  | Added on Thursday, May 21, 2015, 10:20 PM

First they looked in the abstracts. These are the brief summaries of an academic paper, on the first page, and they are widely read, either because people are too busy to read the whole paper, or because they cannot get access to it without a paid subscription (a scandal in itself). 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3388-91  | Added on Friday, May 22, 2015, 12:10 PM

Perhaps the greatest problem is that many of those who read the medical literature implicitly assume that such precautions are taken by all journal editors. But they are wrong to assume this. There is no enforcement for any of what we have covered, everyone is free to ignore it, and so commonly – as with newspapers, politicians and quacks – uncomfortable facts are cheerfully spun away. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3403-7  | Added on Friday, May 22, 2015, 12:13 PM

So, we have established that there are some very serious problems in medicine. We have badly designed trials, which suffer from all kinds of fatal flaws: they’re conducted in unrepresentative patients, they’re too brief, they measure the wrong outcomes, they go missing if the results are unflattering, they get analysed stupidly, and often they’re simply not done at all, simply because of expense, or lack of incentives. These problems are frighteningly common, both for the trials that are used to get a drug on the market, and for the trials that are done later, all of which guide doctors’ and patients’ treatment decisions. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3407-9  | Added on Friday, May 22, 2015, 12:13 PM

It feels as if some people, perhaps, view research as a game, where the idea is to get away with as much as you can, rather than to conduct fair tests of the treatments we use. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3634-38  | Added on Friday, May 22, 2015, 11:17 PM

Instead, we have occasional, small, brief trials, in unrepresentative populations, testing irrelevant comparisons, measuring irrelevant outcomes, with whole trials that go missing, avoidable design flaws, and endless reporting biases that only persist because research is conducted chaotically, for commercial gain, in spuriously expensive trials. The poor-quality evidence created by this system harms patients around the world. And if we wanted, we could fix it. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3713-14  | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015, 05:02 PM

This education is expensive, and the state is unwilling to pay, so it is drug companies that pay for talks, tutorials, teaching materials, conference sessions, and whole conferences, featuring experts who they know prefer their drug. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3734-35  | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015, 05:07 PM

Marketing, therefore, exists for no reason other than to pervert evidence-based decision-making in medicine. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3739-41  | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015, 05:08 PM

So we pay for products, with a huge uplift in price to cover their marketing budget, and that money is then spent on distorting evidence-based practice, which in turn makes our decisions unnecessarily expensive, and less effective. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3751-54  | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015, 05:57 PM

Direct-to-consumer drug advertising has been banned in almost all industrialised countries since the 1940s, for the simple reason that it works: adverts distort doctors’ prescribing behaviour – by design – and increase costs unnecessarily. The USA and New Zealand (along with Pakistan and South Korea) changed their minds in the early 1980s, and permitted a resurgence of this open marketing. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3783-84  | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015, 06:13 PM

I’ll rephrase that for something that’s coming later in this chapter: a lot of people have been convinced that they’re patients. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3784-85  | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015, 06:14 PM

So the evidence shows that adverts change behaviour, and they change it for the worse. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3798-99  | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015, 06:17 PM

when you take a step back from pharmaceutical industry marketing, it is simply a process whereby patients pay money to drug companies, in order for them to produce biased information, which then distorts treatment decisions, making them less effective. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3807  | Added on Saturday, May 23, 2015, 06:18 PM

it’s patients and the public who pay for the industry’s expensive marketing campaigns. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 3918-20  | Added on Sunday, May 24, 2015, 10:19 AM

The story of the serotonin hypothesis for depression, and its enthusiastic promotion by drug companies, is part of a wider process that has been called ‘disease-mongering’ or ‘medicalisation’, where diagnostic categories are widened, whole new diagnoses are invented, and normal variants of human experience are pathologised, so they can be treated with pills. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4047-48  | Added on Sunday, May 24, 2015, 10:37 AM

Patient groups perform a vital and admirable role: they bring patients together, disseminate information and support, and can help to lobby on behalf of people with the condition they represent. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4104-6  | Added on Sunday, May 24, 2015, 10:59 AM

the cost of manufacturing these drugs is often a tenth of the price for which they are sold, that we pay high prices in part for marketing (some of which goes directly to the patient groups), and that when we spend money on one thing, we can’t spend it on something else. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4107-9  | Added on Sunday, May 24, 2015, 11:00 AM

Repeatedly, we come back to the same circle: we pay high prices for drugs; a quarter of what we pay goes on marketing; our money is then spent on things like patient groups; who in turn insist that we should pay very high prices for these drugs, undermining the very groups, like NICE, that try to determine the best choices for patients overall. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4120-22  | Added on Sunday, May 24, 2015, 11:22 AM

So, drugs are used more after their advertising programmes start, and less when they stop. Doctors who recognise the advert for a drug are more likely to prescribe it. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4122-23  | Added on Sunday, May 24, 2015, 11:22 AM

Econometric models – as far as any mortal can follow them through – suggest that marketing has more influence on drug-usage patterns than the publication of new evidence, and so on. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4147-49  | Added on Sunday, May 24, 2015, 11:22 AM

Am I cherry-picking? The best current systematic review is free to read, well worth the time, and found twenty-four similar studies. 47 Overall, it found that only 67 per cent of the claims in adverts are supported by a systematic review, a meta-analysis or a randomised-control trial. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4174-78  | Added on Sunday, May 24, 2015, 11:28 AM

This is naïve arrogance. From the most current systematic review, there have been twenty-nine studies looking at the impact of drug rep visits. 58 Seventeen of those twenty-nine studies found that doctors who see drug reps are more likely to prescribe the promoted drug (six had mixed results, the rest show no difference, and none show a drop in prescribing). Doctors who see drug reps also tend to have higher prescribing costs, and are less likely to follow best-practice prescribing guidelines. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4254-58  | Added on Monday, May 25, 2015, 08:55 AM

Since most drug reps cover a number of doctors, and aim to see each one every three months or so, this level of monitoring and refutation is fairly easy to arrange. They also have flash-cards or iPad shows, with the company branding, key words about their drug, and misleading graphs. Sometimes these graphs will play the same games that newspapers and political pamphlets do: a vertical axis that doesn’t start at zero, for example, exaggerating a modest difference. But sometimes they will be smarter: a graph that shows a huge difference on a bar chart between people having the rep’s drug, for example, and people on another treatment, but where the ‘other treatment’, on close examination, is something rubbish. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4268-70  | Added on Monday, May 25, 2015, 08:57 AM

Social scientists writing on the culture of drug reps suggest that by giving gifts, they become part of the social landscape; and also that doctors develop an unconscious sense of obligation, a debt to be repaid, especially when stronger relationships are built through social events. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4324-26  | Added on Monday, May 25, 2015, 09:43 PM

Don’t see drug reps! If you’re a doctor, or a prescribing nurse, or a medical student, don’t see drug reps. The evidence shows that they will influence your practice, and that you are wrong to believe that they won’t. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4327  | Added on Monday, May 25, 2015, 09:43 PM

Ban drug reps from your clinic or hospital. Drug reps increase costs and work against evidence-based medicine. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4335  | Added on Monday, May 25, 2015, 09:45 PM

Encourage people to declare all gifts and hospitality to their patients. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4339-40  | Added on Monday, May 25, 2015, 09:45 PM

Ban drug reps from your medical school. If you’re a medical student, and you believe, as I think I’ve shown, that drug reps are harmful, you could move to ban them from educational activities. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4347-49  | Added on Monday, May 25, 2015, 09:46 PM

Train medical students and doctors about the dangerous influence drug reps can have on medical practice. To my mind, this is not a political act, but rather a legitimate part of training in evidence-based medicine. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4507-9  | Added on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, 09:51 PM

So, the person conducting a study, analysing the data, writing a paper, steering it into the hands of a journal, and even writing your medical textbook, may not be quite who you imagine. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4552-53  | Added on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, 09:58 PM

Is there a solution? Yes: it’s a system called ‘film credits’, where everyone’s contribution is simply described at the end of the paper: ‘X designed the study, Y wrote the first draft, Z did the statistical analysis,’ and so on. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4593-94  | Added on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, 10:03 PM

In reality, the systems used by journals to select articles are brittle, and vulnerable to exploitation. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4708-11  | Added on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, 10:24 PM

A quarter of the pharmaceutical industry’s revenue is spent on marketing, twice as much as it spends on research and development, and this all comes from your money, for your drugs. We pay 25 per cent more than we need to, an enormous extra mark-up in price, so that tens of billions of pounds can be spent every year producing material that actively confuses doctors, and undermines evidence-based medicine. This is a very odd state of affairs. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4712-13  | Added on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, 10:24 PM

Journals should publish all advertising revenue from each individual drug company annually, and for each individual issue. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4716-17  | Added on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, 10:24 PM

Editors should declare their own conflicts of interest, funding sources if they are working academics, stocks, and so on. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4726-27  | Added on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, 10:30 PM

Doctors need to learn about new drugs all the time, but we leave them to get on with it by themselves. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4786-88  | Added on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, 10:39 PM

It was established that the most senior doctors in the profession were receiving money to give talks that were, in effect, promotional, under the guise of educational activity; it was established that this distorted content changed prescribing behaviour; and then we just left it alone. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4857-58  | Added on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, 10:47 PM

Doctors around the world – except in Norway – are taught which drugs are best by the drug companies themselves. The content is biased, and that’s why companies pay for it. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4857-59  | Added on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, 10:48 PM

Doctors around the world – except in Norway – are taught which drugs are best by the drug companies themselves. The content is biased, and that’s why companies pay for it. For decades people have stood up, shown that the content is biased, written reports against it, demonstrated that weak guidelines fail to police it; and still it continues. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 4959-61  | Added on Tuesday, May 26, 2015, 11:17 PM

In general, the most common approach to conflict of interest is that it should be declared, rather than outlawed, and there are two reasons for pursuing this policy. Firstly, we hope it will allow the reader to decide whether someone is biased; and secondly, it is hoped that it might change behaviour. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 5162-64  | Added on Wednesday, May 27, 2015, 08:50 PM

evidence in medicine is not an abstract academic preoccupation. Evidence is used to make real-world decisions, and when we are fed bad data, we make the wrong decision, inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering, and death, on people just like us. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 5308-11  | Added on Wednesday, May 27, 2015, 09:07 PM

So, if we’re to make any sense of the mess that the pharmaceutical industry – and my profession – has made of the academic literature, then we need an amnesty: we need a full and clear declaration of all the distortions, on missing data, ghostwriting, and all the other activity described in this book, to prevent the ongoing harm that they still cause. There are no two ways about this, and there is no honour in dodging the issue. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 5375-79  | Added on Wednesday, May 27, 2015, 09:13 PM

It’s hard to imagine a betrayal more elaborate, or more complete, across so many institutions and professions. This is a story of pay-offs, of course, but more than that, it’s a story of complacency, laziness, banal self-interest and people feeling impotent. You have been failed by the people at the very top of my profession, for decades now, on matters of life and death, and as with the banks, we’re suddenly discovering a terrifying reality. Nobody took responsibility, nobody was in control, but everybody knew something was wrong. 
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Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients (Ben Goldacre)
- Highlight Loc. 5409-10  | Added on Wednesday, May 27, 2015, 09:15 PM

Selling ineffective sugar pills is not a meaningful policy response the dangerous regulatory failure in the pharmaceutical industry. 
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The City of Gold and Lead (John Christopher)
- Highlight Loc. 1109-10  | Added on Thursday, June 11, 2015, 01:14 PM

The carriage ran on very many small wheels, set beneath one face of a pyramid, and the driver had a seat in the pointed front part for controlling it.
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The City of Gold and Lead (John Christopher)
- Highlight Loc. 1285-88  | Added on Sunday, June 14, 2015, 10:28 PM

A human slave to him was not merely something to do various menial chores around the home, not merely a sign that he was of the rank that qualified him to own such a one, but someone who could listen to him talk. In my village at home, old Mrs. Ash had six cats and spent most of her day talking to one or the other of them. I was my Master's cat.
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When the Tripods Came (John Christopher)
- Highlight Loc. 1419-20  | Added on Sunday, July 19, 2015, 10:32 AM

Andy said, "I read somewhere that by trying to kill them, men have actually improved the intelligence of rats."
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When the Tripods Came (John Christopher)
- Highlight Loc. 1432-33  | Added on Sunday, July 19, 2015, 10:34 AM

Tourism was a thing of the past, along with parliaments and television chat shows, universities and churches, human disorder and human freedom.
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When the Tripods Came (John Christopher)
- Highlight Loc. 1455-56  | Added on Sunday, July 19, 2015, 10:38 AM

Who could tell what wonders might still have lain ahead? But now, thanks to the Tripods, it had all ended.
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 209-11  | Added on Sunday, July 19, 2015, 03:00 PM

He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius I was, saying, “He fixes radios by thinking!” The whole idea of thinking, to fix a radio—a little boy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it—he never thought that was possible. 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 352-53  | Added on Sunday, July 19, 2015, 10:47 PM

I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world. 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 465-66  | Added on Monday, July 20, 2015, 12:20 AM

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile! 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight on Page 37 | Loc. 476-77  | Added on Monday, July 20, 2015, 12:22 AM

So this kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people. 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 556-57  | Added on Monday, July 20, 2015, 12:35 AM

But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen. 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 869-70  | Added on Tuesday, July 28, 2015, 05:35 AM

So MIT was good, but Slater was right to warn me to go to another school for my graduate work. And I often advise my students the same way. Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile. 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1120-21  | Added on Saturday, August 08, 2015, 01:08 AM

Einstein appreciated that things might be different from what his theory stated; he was very tolerant of other ideas. 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character: Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight Loc. 2372-73  | Added on Monday, September 07, 2015, 09:43 PM

The second psychiatrist was obviously more important, because his scribble was harder to read. 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character: Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight Loc. 3881-82  | Added on Monday, September 21, 2015, 08:33 AM

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character: Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight Loc. 4246-50  | Added on Wednesday, September 23, 2015, 09:47 AM

There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! And that’s what I got at the conference, a bunch of pompous fools, and I got very upset. I’m not going to get upset like that again, so I won’t participate in interdisciplinary conferences any more. 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character: Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight Loc. 5055-57  | Added on Saturday, September 26, 2015, 03:21 PM

I believe there’s nothing in hallucinations that has anything to do with anything external to the internal psychological state of the person who’s got the hallucination. But there are nevertheless a lot of experiences by a lot of people who believe there’s reality in hallucinations. 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character: Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight Loc. 5075-79  | Added on Saturday, September 26, 2015, 03:24 PM

DURING the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas—which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked—or very little of it did. 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character: Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight Loc. 5153-54  | Added on Saturday, September 26, 2015, 10:50 PM

But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis. 
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character: Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton)
- Highlight Loc. 5154-55  | Added on Saturday, September 26, 2015, 10:50 PM

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. 
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Hygiène De L'Assassin (Amélie Nothomb)
- Highlight Loc. 837-38  | Added on Monday, September 28, 2015, 10:20 PM

Attention, ne mélangez pas : écrire, ce n'est pas chercher à communiquer.
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Hygiène De L'Assassin (Amélie Nothomb)
- Highlight Loc. 923-25  | Added on Tuesday, September 29, 2015, 10:33 PM

Les sujets des thèses m'ont toujours amusé et attendri : c'est mignon, ces étudiants qui, pour imiter les grands, écrivent des sottises dont les titres sont hypersophistiqués et dont les contenus sont la banalité même, comme ces restaurants prétentieux qui affublent les oeufs mayonnaise d'appellations grandioses.
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Hygiène De L'Assassin (Amélie Nothomb)
- Highlight Loc. 1587-89  | Added on Thursday, October 01, 2015, 09:43 PM

Vous savez, il y a toujours une poignée de désoeuvrés, de végétariens, de critiques novices, d'étudiants masochistes ou encore de curieux qui vont jusqu'à lire les livres qu'ils achètent.
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Hygiène De L'Assassin (Amélie Nothomb)
- Highlight Loc. 2148-50  | Added on Friday, October 02, 2015, 11:23 PM

- En ce cas, je veux vous voir déchoir davantage. Allez-y, déchoyez. - Vous ne pouvez pas dire ça, c'est un verbe défectif. - Si vous saviez ce que je m'en fous. Mais si ce verbe défectif vous gêne, j'en connais un autre qui ne l'est pas : rampez.
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Functional Programming in Scala (Paul Chiusano Rúnar Bjarnason)
- Highlight Loc. 771-72  | Added on Monday, October 05, 2015, 09:51 PM

Many functional programmers feel that short names make code easier to read, since it makes the structure of the code easier to see at a glance.
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Les Testaments Trahis (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 490-92  | Added on Thursday, November 26, 2015, 09:53 PM

Tout ce qu’on écrit sur Kafka n’est pas de la kafkologie. Comment donc définir la kafkologie ? Par une tautologie : La kafkologie est le discours destiné à kafkologiser Kafka. À substituer à Kafka le Kafka kafkologisé 
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Functional Programming in Scala (Paul Chiusano Rúnar Bjarnason)
- Highlight Loc. 4778-82  | Added on Tuesday, December 01, 2015, 08:58 PM

So we can state plainly what a monad is: A monad is an implementation of one of the minimal sets of monadic combinators, satisfying the laws of associativity and identity. That’s a perfectly respectable, precise, and terse definition. And if we’re being precise, this is the only correct definition. A monad is precisely defined by its operations and laws; no more, no less. But it’s a little unsatisfying. It doesn’t say much about what it implies—what a monad means. The problem is that it’s a self-contained 
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Functional Programming in Scala (Paul Chiusano Rúnar Bjarnason)
- Highlight Loc. 4805-6  | Added on Tuesday, December 01, 2015, 09:01 PM

We could say that monads provide a context for introducing and binding variables, and performing variable substitution.
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Functional Programming in Scala (Paul Chiusano Rúnar Bjarnason)
- Highlight Loc. 4903-4  | Added on Thursday, December 03, 2015, 08:58 PM

Monads provide a powerful interface, as evidenced by the fact that we can use flatMap to essentially write imperative programs in a purely functional way.
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Functional Programming in Scala (Paul Chiusano Rúnar Bjarnason)
- Highlight Loc. 5019-20  | Added on Thursday, December 03, 2015, 09:21 PM

Applicative constructs context-free computations, while Monad allows for context sensitivity.[2]
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Functional Programming in Scala (Paul Chiusano Rúnar Bjarnason)
- Highlight Loc. 5384-85  | Added on Tuesday, December 08, 2015, 06:28 PM

functors are a less expressive but more compositional generalization of monads. The functions unit and map allow us to lift values and functions, whereas map2 and apply give us the power to lift functions of higher arities.
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Functional Programming in Scala (Paul Chiusano Rúnar Bjarnason)
- Highlight Loc. 5441-42  | Added on Tuesday, December 08, 2015, 08:10 PM

The insight here is that inside every function with side effects is a pure function waiting to get out.
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Functional Programming in Scala (Paul Chiusano Rúnar Bjarnason)
- Highlight Loc. 5837-39  | Added on Thursday, December 10, 2015, 09:11 AM

As far as we’re concerned, a program is just a referentially transparent expression—a pure computation that may occasionally make requests of some interpreter. The interpreter is free to use side effects or not. That’s now an entirely separate concern.
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Functional Programming in Scala (Paul Chiusano Rúnar Bjarnason)
- Highlight Loc. 6261-65  | Added on Saturday, December 12, 2015, 07:09 PM

This brings us to an essential point: tracking effects is a choice we make as programmers. It’s a value judgement, and there are trade-offs associated with how we choose. We can take it as far as we want. But as with the context of referential transparency, in Scala there’s a kind of standard choice. For example, it would be completely valid and possible to track memory allocations in the type system if that really mattered to us. But in Scala we have the benefit of automatic memory management, so the cost of explicit tracking is usually higher than the benefit.
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Les Testaments Trahis (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 1232-34  | Added on Sunday, December 13, 2015, 10:05 PM

Mais il n’y a là aucune surprise : personne n’est plus insensible que les gens sentimentaux. Souvenez-vous : « Sécheresse du cœur dissimulée derrière le style débordant de sentiments. 
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Les Testaments Trahis (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 1331-36  | Added on Monday, December 21, 2015, 10:31 PM

(Signalons la terreur qu’éprouvent tous les traducteurs du monde entier devant les mots « être » et « avoir » ! Ils feront n’importe quoi pour les remplacer par un mot qu’ils considèrent comme moins banal.) Cette tendance est compréhensible : d’après quoi le traducteur sera-t-il apprécié ? D’après sa fidélité au style de l’auteur ? C’est exactement ce que les lecteurs de son pays n’auront pas la possibilité de juger. En revanche, la richesse du vocabulaire sera automatiquement ressentie par le public comme une valeur, comme une performance, une preuve de la maîtrise et de la compétence du traducteur. 
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Les Testaments Trahis (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 1466-67  | Added on Thursday, December 24, 2015, 12:57 PM

Kafka insistait pour que ses livres soient imprimés en très grands caractères. On le rappelle aujourd’hui avec la souriante indulgence que provoquent les caprices des grands hommes. 
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Les Testaments Trahis (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 1477-79  | Added on Thursday, December 24, 2015, 12:58 PM

On se moque du désir de Kafka de voir son texte imprimé (pour des raisons esthétiques tout à fait justifiées) avec de grands caractères ; on repêche toutes les phrases qu’il a décidé (pour des raisons esthétiques tout à fait justifiées) d’anéantir. Dans cette indifférence à la volonté esthétique de l’auteur, toute la tristesse du destin posthume de l’œuvre de Kafka se reflète. 
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Les Testaments Trahis (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 1561-65  | Added on Thursday, December 24, 2015, 01:10 PM

Nous pouvons tenir assidûment un journal et noter tous les événements. Un jour, en relisant les notes, nous comprendrons qu’elles ne sont pas en mesure d’évoquer une seule image concrète. Et encore pis : que l’imagination n’est pas capable de venir en aide à notre mémoire et de reconstruire l’oublié. Car le présent, le concret du présent, en tant que phénomène à examiner, en tant que structure, est pour nous une planète inconnue ; nous ne savons donc ni le retenir dans notre mémoire ni le reconstruire par l’imagination. On meurt sans savoir ce qu’on a vécu. 
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Les Testaments Trahis (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 1596-98  | Added on Thursday, December 24, 2015, 01:36 PM

il s’agit d’une découverte pour ainsi dire ontologique : la découverte de la structure du moment présent ; la découverte de la coexistence perpétuelle du banal et du dramatique sur laquelle nos vies sont fondées. 
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Les Testaments Trahis (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 2080-82  | Added on Saturday, December 26, 2015, 12:31 PM

Oui. Il n’y a pas de différence ontologique entre nouvelle et roman, alors qu’il y en a entre roman et poésie, roman et théâtre. Victimes des contingences du vocabulaire, nous n’avons pas un terme unique pour embrasser ces deux formes, grande et petite, du même art.) 
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Les Testaments Trahis (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 3256-61  | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2015, 02:25 PM

Et pourtant, ces lettres Brod les a rendues publiques ; auparavant, dans son propre testament, il avait demandé à Kafka d’« anéantir certaines choses » ; or, lui-même il publie tout, sans discernement ; même cette longue et pénible lettre trouvée dans un tiroir, lettre que Kafka ne s’était jamais décidé à envoyer à son père et que, grâce à Brod, n’importe qui a pu lire ensuite, sauf son destinataire. L’indiscrétion de Brod ne trouve à mes yeux aucune excuse. Il a trahi son ami. Il a agi contre sa volonté, contre le sens et l’esprit de sa volonté, contre sa nature pudique qu’il connaissait. 
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Les Testaments Trahis (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 3329-33  | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2015, 02:36 PM

J’achète la Symphonie no 1 de Mahler sous la direction de Seiji Ozawa. Cette symphonie en quatre mouvements en comportait d’abord cinq, mais après la première exécution Mahler a écarté définitivement le deuxième qu’on ne trouve dans aucune partition imprimée. Ozawa l’a réinséré dans la symphonie ; ainsi tout un chacun peut enfin comprendre que Mahler était très lucide en le supprimant. Dois-je continuer ? La liste est sans fin. 
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Les Testaments Trahis (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 3369-73  | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2015, 02:56 PM

Avant que le droit d’auteur ne devienne loi, il a fallu un certain état d’esprit disposé à respecter l’auteur. Cet état d’esprit qui pendant des siècles lentement s’est formé me semble se défaire aujourd’hui. Sinon, on ne pourrait pas accompagner une publicité pour papier hygiénique avec des mesures d’une symphonie de Brahms. Ou éditer sous des applaudissements les versions raccourcies des romans de Stendhal. Si l’état d’esprit qui respecte l’auteur existait encore, les gens se demanderaient : Brahms serait-il d’accord ? Stendhal ne se fâcherait-il pas ? 
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Les Testaments Trahis (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 3422-23  | Added on Tuesday, December 29, 2015, 03:02 PM

Ainsi Brod a-t-il créé l’exemple à suivre de la désobéissance aux amis morts ; une jurisprudence pour ceux qui veulent passer outre la dernière volonté d’un auteur ou divulguer ses secrets les plus intimes. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 48-51  | Added on Tuesday, January 05, 2016, 08:27 AM

Smarter-than-human intelligence. That's all. Whether it's created through Artificial Intelligence, Brain-Computer Interfacing, neurosurgery, genetic engineering, or whatever—the Singularity is the point at which our ability to predict the future breaks down because a new character is introduced that is different from all prior characters in the human story. That character is greater-than-human intelligence, whether an enhanced human or a robot. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 243-46  | Added on Monday, January 11, 2016, 10:03 PM

Because it is a non-intelligent process—the unavoidable reality that conditions will always favor some designs over others— evolution by natural selection has to break many, many eggs in order to make an omelet. When we marvel at the swiftness of the cheetah, we do not see the billions of ancestral cousins that weren’t quite fast enough. When we delight in the vibrant plumage of many birds, we do not see the loveless flocks of bachelors that weren’t quite attractive enough. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 289-91  | Added on Tuesday, January 12, 2016, 09:41 PM

We presently live in a beautiful-but-indifferent world where death and hardship are the norm. Adversity is, after all, the driving force behind natural selection. But as if that weren’t enough, evolution has tragically engineered us not to experience lasting happiness, but to restlessly tend insatiable appetites in the service of our genes. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 460-62  | Added on Thursday, January 14, 2016, 10:34 PM

If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. But if you discovered a simple way to make food optional, you, the man, and the fish could move on to other pursuits. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 746-50  | Added on Wednesday, January 27, 2016, 12:06 PM

Our lives are small temporally as well as spatially: if this 14 billion year cosmic history were scaled to one year, then 100,000 years of human history would be 4 minutes and a 100 year life would be 0.2 seconds. Further deflating our hubris, we've learned that we're not that special either. Darwin taught us that we're animals, Freud taught us that we're irrational, machines now outpower us, and just last month, Deep Fritz outsmarted our Chess champion Vladimir Kramnik. Adding insult to injury, cosmologists have found that we're not even made out of the majority substance. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 756  | Added on Wednesday, January 27, 2016, 12:07 PM

I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 876-78  | Added on Wednesday, January 27, 2016, 02:05 PM

To put it in a single sentence, advanced AI is potentially dangerous because only a minority of cognitively possible goal sets place a high priority on the continued survival of human beings and the structures we value. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 900-902  | Added on Wednesday, January 27, 2016, 02:06 PM

Most AI researchers do not comprehend the magnitude of the “Friendly AI problem” because no one wants to have to take the responsibility of creating the first truly intelligent artificial being. They just want to play with their program and ignore the long-term consequences. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 964-66  | Added on Sunday, January 31, 2016, 09:59 PM

An AI that is very powerful but does not understand the subtleties of human morality will eventually kill many people, by accident or deliberately, in the course of accomplishing its goals. Unless people are specifically valued, they will be killed for the sake of some higher goal. It will not have hard feelings, it will just find the elimination of certain humans (eventually all of them) instrumentally useful for its goals. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 1271-72  | Added on Tuesday, February 09, 2016, 10:24 PM

The Singularity is not necessarily extreme life extension, human brain scanning, accelerating technological progress, blasting off in every direction at the speed of light (part of Ray Kurzweil's definition), etc. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 1271-73  | Added on Tuesday, February 09, 2016, 10:24 PM

The Singularity is not necessarily extreme life extension, human brain scanning, accelerating technological progress, blasting off in every direction at the speed of light (part of Ray Kurzweil's definition), etc. The Singularity is smarter-than-human intelligence. That's it. Nothing else. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 1276-77  | Added on Tuesday, February 09, 2016, 10:25 PM

To disagree with the idea that this sort of Singularity is possible, you have to believe that human intelligence is the maximum possible level of intelligence permitted by the physical universe. And that is just absurd. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 1460-62  | Added on Monday, February 15, 2016, 09:47 PM

This could be used to build advanced robotic components with atomic precision, including neutron bombs and delivery mechanisms. If you figure out a way to defend against neutron bombs, the AI will just build a robot that walks up to you and stabs you in the heart with a diamond spike. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 1496-98  | Added on Monday, February 15, 2016, 09:47 PM

Consciousness is interesting to think about, but it can be a red herring. Too often, sophisticated-sounding arguments about consciousness and its relationship to AI boil down to one simple and ultimately boring sentiment: “I know I am conscious, and I know other humans are, but I am philosophically uncomfortable with the idea of a conscious machine.” 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 1500-1502  | Added on Monday, February 15, 2016, 09:47 PM

You are still special even though your mind is non-magical—don't worry. We humans have survived Copernican revolutions before, we'll manage. Our civilization didn't end when we found out that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe. It won't end when we realize that humans are not the only minds that can feel things consciously. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 1516-20  | Added on Monday, February 15, 2016, 09:51 PM

This is anthropocentrism at work. It's basically humanity being a big baby and saying “me, me, me”. Everything is about me. To be intelligent, an entity needs my emotions, my desires, my concerns, my relationships, my insecurities, my personal quirks. No it doesn't. Humans are just one possible intelligence in a galaxy of possible intelligences. Get over yourself. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 1733-34  | Added on Friday, February 19, 2016, 08:08 AM

The sense of control we get when we think of sparking the Singularity with a human is an illusion. For true control over the outcome of the Singularity, we need Friendly AI. 
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Our Accelerating Future: How Superintelligence, Nanotechnology, and Transhumanism Will Transform the Planet (Michael M. Anissimov)
- Highlight Loc. 1823-24  | Added on Friday, February 19, 2016, 08:16 AM

A planet full of attractive people would do a lot to improve our quality of life. I don't care if that sounds superficial, it's the truth. You know it. 
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Le Petit Prince (Annoté, Illustré) (French Edition) (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
- Highlight Loc. 389-90  | Added on Saturday, February 27, 2016, 07:47 PM

-Tu te jugeras donc toi-même, lui répondit le roi. C'est le plus difficile. Il est bien plus difficile de se juger soi-même que de juger autrui. Si tu réussis à bien te juger, c'est que tu es un véritable sage.
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Le Petit Prince (Annoté, Illustré) (French Edition) (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
- Highlight Loc. 702-3  | Added on Monday, February 29, 2016, 09:46 PM

Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
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Le Petit Prince (Annoté, Illustré) (French Edition) (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
- Highlight Loc. 704-5  | Added on Monday, February 29, 2016, 09:46 PM

-C'est le temps que tu a perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante.
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L'Insoutenable Légèreté De L'être (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 498-99  | Added on Tuesday, March 15, 2016, 10:40 PM

Le héros beethovénien est un haltérophile soulevant des poids métaphysiques.
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L'Insoutenable Légèreté De L'être (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 719-20  | Added on Monday, March 28, 2016, 10:48 PM

on peut avec raison reprocher à l’homme d’être aveugle à ces hasards dans la vie quotidienne et de priver ainsi la vie de sa dimension de beauté.
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L'Insoutenable Légèreté De L'être (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 1153-54  | Added on Tuesday, April 05, 2016, 08:29 AM

Sa bonne humeur était revenue. Genève, qu’il avait maudite toute sa vie comme la métropole de l’ennui, lui semblait belle et pleine d’aventures.
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L'Insoutenable Légèreté De L'être (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 1209  | Added on Tuesday, April 05, 2016, 08:39 AM

Ce qui n’est pas l’effet d’un choix ne peut être tenu pour un mérite ou pour un échec.
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L'Insoutenable Légèreté De L'être (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 1275-78  | Added on Tuesday, April 05, 2016, 08:48 AM

À l’étranger, elle constate que la transformation de la musique en bruit est un processus planétaire qui fait entrer l’humanité dans la phase historique de la laideur totale. L’absolu de la laideur s’est d’abord manifesté par l’omniprésente laideur acoustique : les voitures, les motos, les guitares électriques, les marteaux piqueurs, les haut-parleurs, les sirènes. L’omniprésence de la laideur visuelle ne tardera pas à suivre.
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L'Insoutenable Légèreté De L'être (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 1513-15  | Added on Sunday, April 10, 2016, 03:53 PM

Il y a maintenant des siècles que la foi calviniste a fait de l’église un simple hangar qui n’a d’autre fonction que de protéger la prière des fidèles de la neige et de la pluie.
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L'Insoutenable Légèreté De L'être (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 1722-24  | Added on Sunday, April 10, 2016, 05:43 PM

On peut trahir des parents, un époux, un amour, une patrie, mais que restera-t-il à trahir quand il n’y aura plus ni parents, ni mari, ni amour, ni patrie ? Sabina sentait le vide autour d’elle. Et si ce vide, c’était précisément le but de toutes ses trahisons ?
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L'Insoutenable Légèreté De L'être (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 2978-80  | Added on Sunday, April 17, 2016, 03:37 PM

Savez-vous l’effort que ça représente, pour l’historien de la littérature, de reconstituer la vie sexuelle d’un Voltaire, d’un Balzac ou d’un Tolstoï ? Dans le cas des écrivains tchèques, ils n’auront aucun doute. Tout est enregistré. Le moindre soupir. »
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L'Insoutenable Légèreté De L'être (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 3147-50  | Added on Sunday, April 17, 2016, 03:52 PM

la vie humaine n’a lieu qu’une seule fois et nous ne pourrons jamais vérifier quelle était la bonne et quelle était la mauvaise décision, parce que, dans toute situation, nous ne pouvons décider qu’une seule fois. Il ne nous est pas donné une deuxième, une troisième, une quatrième vie pour que nous puissions comparer différentes décisions.
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L'Insoutenable Légèreté De L'être (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 3983-87  | Added on Wednesday, April 20, 2016, 10:38 PM

Ce droit nous semble aller de soi parce que c’est nous qui nous trouvons au sommet de la hiérarchie. Mais il suffirait qu’un tiers s’immisce dans le jeu, par exemple un visiteur venu d’une autre planète dont le Dieu aurait dit « Tu régneras sur les créatures de toutes les autres étoiles », et toute l’évidence de la Genèse serait aussitôt remise en question. L’homme attelé à un charroi par un Martien, éventuellement grillé à la broche par un habitant de la Voie lactée, se rappellera peut-être alors la côtelette de veau qu’il avait coutume de découper sur son assiette et présentera (trop tard) ses excuses à la vache.
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L'Insoutenable Légèreté De L'être (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 4039-41  | Added on Wednesday, April 20, 2016, 10:44 PM

La vraie bonté de l’homme ne peut se manifester en toute pureté et en toute liberté qu’à l’égard de ceux qui ne représentent aucune force. Le véritable test moral de l’humanité (le plus radical, qui se situe à un niveau si profond qu’il échappe à notre regard), ce sont ses relations avec ceux qui sont à sa merci : les animaux.
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L'Insoutenable Légèreté De L'être (Milan Kundera)
- Highlight Loc. 4185-86  | Added on Sunday, April 24, 2016, 12:12 PM

C’est pourquoi l’homme ne peut être heureux puisque le bonheur est désir de répétition.
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight Loc. 92-95  | Added on Tuesday, April 26, 2016, 06:51 PM

Although this book deals with the conflict between religion and science, I see this as only one battle in a wider war—a war between rationality and superstition. Religion is but a single brand of superstition (others include beliefs in astrology, paranormal phenomena, homeopathy, and spiritual healing), but it is the most widespread and harmful form of superstition. And science is but one form of rationality (philosophy and mathematics are others), but it is a highly developed form, and the only one capable of describing and understanding reality. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight Loc. 259-61  | Added on Sunday, May 01, 2016, 09:57 PM

I’d claim that adopting a more broadly scientific viewpoint not only helps us make better decisions, both for ourselves and for society as a whole, but also brings alive the many wonders of science barred to those who see it as something distant and forbidding (it’s not). 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight Loc. 274-76  | Added on Sunday, May 01, 2016, 10:03 PM

I will have achieved my aim if, by the end of this book, you demand that people produce good reasons for what they believe—not only in religion, but in any area in which evidence can be brought to bear. I’ll have achieved my aim when people devote as much effort to choosing a system of belief as they do to choosing their doctor. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 1 | Loc. 287-90  | Added on Monday, May 02, 2016, 10:18 PM

Science and religion—unlike, say, business and religion—are competitors at discovering truths about nature. And science is the only field that has the ability to disprove the truth claims of religion, and has done so repeatedly (the creation stories of Genesis and other faiths, the Noachian flood, and the fictitious Exodus of the Jews from Egypt come to mind). Religion, on the other hand, has no ability to overturn the truths found by science. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 385-88  | Added on Tuesday, May 03, 2016, 06:03 PM

Harmonizing religion and science makes you seem like an open-minded and reasonable person, while asserting their incompatibility makes enemies and brands you as “militant.” The reason is clear: religion occupies a privileged place in our society. Attacking it is off-limits, although going after other supernatural or paranormal beliefs like ESP, homeopathy, or political worldviews is not. Accommodationism is not meant to defend science, which can stand on its own, but to show that in some way religion can still make credible claims about the world. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 482-83  | Added on Tuesday, May 03, 2016, 06:16 PM

The difference in religiosity between the American public and American scientists is profound, persistent, and well documented. Further, the more accomplished the scientist, the greater the likelihood that he or she is a nonbeliever. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 521-23  | Added on Tuesday, May 03, 2016, 06:23 PM

religious scientists are in some ways like the many smokers who don’t get lung cancer. Just as those cancer-free individuals don’t invalidate the statistical relationship between smoking and the disease, so the existence of religious scientists doesn’t refute an antagonistic relationship between science and faith. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 770-71  | Added on Tuesday, May 03, 2016, 07:06 PM

Any “knowledge” incapable of being revised with advances in data and human thinking does not deserve the name of knowledge. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 775-78  | Added on Tuesday, May 03, 2016, 07:08 PM

What is “known” may sometimes change, so science isn’t really a fixed body of knowledge. What remains is what I really see as “science,” which is simply a method for understanding how the universe (matter, our bodies and behavior, the cosmos, and so on) actually works. Science is a set of tools, refined over hundreds of years, for getting answers about nature. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 29 | Loc. 787-88  | Added on Tuesday, May 03, 2016, 07:09 PM

The doubt and criticality of science are there precisely for the reason Feynman emphasized: to prevent us from believing what we’d like to be true. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 1123  | Added on Friday, May 06, 2016, 10:08 PM

Clearly most of those who accept God are theists, not deists. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 54 | Loc. 1247-48  | Added on Friday, May 06, 2016, 10:21 PM

As I often say, some believers are literalists about nearly everything, but nearly every believer is a literalist about something. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 54 | Loc. 1252-54  | Added on Friday, May 06, 2016, 10:22 PM

When a scientific claim is disproved, it goes into the dustbin of good ideas that simply didn’t pan out. When a religious claim is disproved, it often turns into a metaphor that imparts a made-up “lesson.” 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 57 | Loc. 1297-99  | Added on Friday, May 06, 2016, 10:33 PM

I often hear theologians argue that their predecessors like Aquinas and Augustine were not literalists, and that literalism began only in the nineteenth or twentieth century. But that’s a distortion of history, one designed to save churches from the embarrassment of having taken seriously stories now seen as palpably fictitious. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 1411-13  | Added on Friday, May 06, 2016, 11:36 PM

The question to ask believers is this: “Does it really matter whether what you believe about God is true—or don’t you care?” If it does matter, then you must justify your beliefs; if it doesn’t, then you must justify belief itself. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 64 | Loc. 1431-33  | Added on Friday, May 06, 2016, 11:39 PM

My claim is this: science and religion are incompatible because they have different methods for getting knowledge about reality, have different ways of assessing the reliability of that knowledge, and, in the end, arrive at conflicting conclusions about the universe. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1579-80  | Added on Saturday, May 07, 2016, 05:28 PM

Where religion diverges from science is how its adherents behave when the evidence doesn’t support their beliefs. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 76 | Loc. 1651-52  | Added on Sunday, May 08, 2016, 05:57 PM

If the Bible was intended as pure allegory, that fact somehow escaped the notice of churches and theologians for centuries. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1657-60  | Added on Sunday, May 08, 2016, 05:58 PM

The big problem for believers, of course, is to find a consistent method for distinguishing fact from metaphor. If Adam and Eve are metaphors, could the Resurrection be a metaphor as well—perhaps for spiritual rebirth? And how are we supposed to interpret God’s commands in the Old Testament that a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath should be put to death, as should practicing homosexuals, adulterers, and those who curse their parents? Because these are no longer seen as valid moral prescriptions, are they really metaphors for something else, or did God simply change his mind? 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1661-65  | Added on Sunday, May 08, 2016, 05:59 PM

The way liberal believers winnow fact from metaphor is in fact to use science: whatever science has falsified becomes metaphor, and what has not yet been falsified can retain its status as fact. But this makes religious dogma subservient to science. The accommodationist strategy of accepting both science and conventional faith, then, leaves you with a double standard: rational on the origin of blood clotting, irrational on the Resurrection; rational on dinosaurs, irrational on virgin births. Scientists, archaeologists, and historians can tell us which parts of scripture are false, but who can affirm what is true? There are no good criteria. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1772-73  | Added on Monday, May 16, 2016, 10:03 PM

The obvious question is this: why are believers in mainstream religions, like Islam and Christianity, less critical of their own faiths than of others? 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1775  | Added on Monday, May 16, 2016, 10:04 PM

Their persistence has given them an aura of credibility, somehow making their claims seem less contrived. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1777-78  | Added on Monday, May 16, 2016, 10:05 PM

Religion has hijacked the evolved tendency of humans to accept authority when they’re young, something that would have enhanced the survival of our ancestors (learning is a good way to avoid the dangers of experience). 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1780-81  | Added on Monday, May 16, 2016, 10:06 PM

To a very large extent, which religion you accept and which you reject are accidents of birth. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1815-16  | Added on Tuesday, May 17, 2016, 10:56 PM

The only rational solution is to apply the same degree of skepticism toward the claims of your own faith as you do toward the ones you reject. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1952-53  | Added on Sunday, May 22, 2016, 10:11 PM

We can in principle allow a Divine Foot in the door; it’s just that we’ve never seen the Foot. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 94 | Loc. 1972-73  | Added on Sunday, May 22, 2016, 10:19 PM

If something is supposed to exist in a way that has tangible effects on the universe, it falls within the ambit of science. And supernatural beings and phenomena can have real-world effects. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 2012-15  | Added on Sunday, May 22, 2016, 10:26 PM

There is no harmony between religion and science . When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: “Let us be friends.” It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: “Let us agree not to step on each other’s feet.” —Robert Green Ingersoll 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 2279-80  | Added on Tuesday, May 24, 2016, 11:16 PM

In the end, NOMA is simply an unsatisfying quarrel about labels that, unless you profess a watery deism, cannot reconcile science and religion. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 2431-32  | Added on Thursday, May 26, 2016, 10:17 PM

This shows what we already know: belief may arise by indoctrination or authority, but is often maintained by social utility. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 2645-46  | Added on Friday, May 27, 2016, 11:13 PM

This is the usual double standard in using evidence—accept it if it supports your preconceptions, reject it if it doesn’t—that distinguishes science from religion. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2955-57  | Added on Monday, May 30, 2016, 10:27 PM

The biggest problem with theistic evolution, as with all attempts to twist theology to fit new facts, is that it’s simply a metaphysical add-on to a physical theory, a supplement demanded not by evidence but by the emotional needs of the faithful. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 3095-97  | Added on Wednesday, June 01, 2016, 11:03 PM

To the layperson, our consciousness seems scientifically inexplicable because it’s hard to imagine how the sense of “I-ness”—and our subjective sensations of beauty, pleasure, or pain—could be produced by a mass of neurons in our head. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 3098-99  | Added on Wednesday, June 01, 2016, 11:04 PM

Only the last—the so-called hard problem of consciousness—seems baffling, for it’s difficult to imagine how a brain that can be studied objectively produces feelings that are subjective. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 3103-5  | Added on Wednesday, June 01, 2016, 11:07 PM

the most recalcitrant problem of science isn’t the origin of life, or the origin of the laws of physics, but the evolution and mechanics of our brains and the minds they produce. This is the result of a peculiar recursion: we’re forced to use an organ that evolved for other reasons to study how that organ makes us feel. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 3541-43  | Added on Sunday, June 05, 2016, 10:13 PM

evolution. The anthropologist Pascal Boyer , for instance, proposes that religion began with the inborn and adaptive tendency of our ancestors to attribute puzzling events to conscious agents. If you hear a rustle in the bushes, you’re more likely to survive (or get food) if you believe it came from another animal than from a gust of wind. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3630-31  | Added on Monday, June 06, 2016, 10:19 PM

I see science as a method, not a profession. Science construed in this broad way embraces all acts, including those of plumbers and electricians, that involve making and testing hypotheses. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 3781-83  | Added on Wednesday, June 08, 2016, 11:12 PM

The reason believers argue for “other ways of knowing” is simply to show that science has no monopoly on finding truth, and therefore that religion might muscle in alongside archaeology and history. But as we’ve seen, insofar as archaeology, economics, sociology, and history produce knowledge, they do so by using the methods of science broadly construed: verifiable, tested, and generally agreed-upon results of empirical study. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3838-39  | Added on Wednesday, June 08, 2016, 11:23 PM

In the first sense of the term, then, most of my colleagues and I are indeed guilty of scientism. But in that sense scientism is a virtue—the virtue of holding convictions with a tenacity proportional to the evidence supporting them. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 3879-80  | Added on Thursday, June 09, 2016, 10:28 PM

In the end, as Daniel Dennett argues, scientism “ is a completely undefined term . It just means science that you don’t like.” 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 216 | Loc. 4151-53  | Added on Sunday, June 12, 2016, 09:37 PM

In medieval and Renaissance Europe, nearly everyone was a Christian, or at least professed to be, simply because it was a universal belief that prominent people defied at peril of execution. If Christianity gave rise to science between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, then you could give religion credit for everything that humans devised in that period. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 236 | Loc. 4520-21  | Added on Thursday, June 16, 2016, 10:01 PM

Although such infections can usually be cured easily with a dose of penicillin, Ryan didn’t have that option, and died. What killed him was not religious faith, but faith in alternative medicine. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 238 | Loc. 4546-49  | Added on Thursday, June 16, 2016, 10:07 PM

In 1992, the U.S. Congress funded an Office of Alternative Medicine, which seven years later became the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), still associated with the prestigious National Institutes of Health. In the two decades ending in 2012, the government sank $2 billion into NCCAM. Despite that huge expenditure, the center has never produced one bit of evidence for the value of “alternative medicine”—and that includes acupuncture, reiki, and various forms of spiritual healing. 
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Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Jerry A. Coyne)
- Highlight on Page 244 | Loc. 4659-60  | Added on Friday, June 17, 2016, 11:10 PM

Is there any institution other than religion that could see terminal suffering as beneficial? 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 58-59  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 10:45 AM

Il ne s’agit donc pas de ne s’occuper que des animaux, mais de s’occuper aussi des animaux. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 59-60  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 10:45 AM

Il ne s’agit pas non plus d’humaniser les animaux ou d’animaliser l’homme, mais d’étendre aux deux notre bienveillance. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 82-83  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 10:47 AM

Le point commun le plus frappant entre l’homme et l’animal est la capacité de ressentir la souffrance. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 156-57  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2016, 09:53 PM

James Serpell, professeur d’éthique animale à l’université de Pennsylvanie, observe que seules les cultures ayant domestiqué des animaux défendent la thèse de leur infériorité par rapport à l’homme. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 526-28  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2016, 11:17 PM

Un être dit « sensible » est un organisme vivant capable de faire la différence entre un bien-être et une douleur, entre plusieurs façons d’être traité, c’est-à-dire entre différentes conditions propices ou néfastes à sa survie. Il est aussi capable de réagir en conséquence, c’est-à-dire d’éviter ou de s’éloigner de ce qui pourrait interrompre son existence et de rechercher ce qui la favorise. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 767-71  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2016, 10:36 PM

Comme le remarque Aymeric Caron : « A-t-on jamais vu une école organiser une sortie pédagogique dans un abattoir ? Jamais. Pourquoi ? D’où nous vient cette pudeur qui nous force à taire aux enfants le sort que nous réservons aux animaux ? Un égorgement, une électrocution, une éviscération sont-ils des scènes obscènes pour des yeux innocents ? La réponse est oui 8 . » 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 1020-22  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2016, 07:40 PM

L’équation est simple : 1 hectare de terre peut nourrir 50 végétaliens ou 2 carnivores. Pour produire 1 kg de viande, il faut la même surface de terre que pour cultiver 200 kg de tomates, ou 160 kg de pommes de terre, ou 80 kg de pommes 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 1036-37  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2016, 07:42 PM

Manger de la viande est donc un privilège de pays riche qui s’exerce au détriment des pays pauvres. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 1078-79  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2016, 07:46 PM

On estime que la moitié de la consommation d’eau potable mondiale est destinée à la production de viande et de produits laitiers. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 1172-77  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2016, 08:02 PM

au large des côtes de Californie et du Mexique, les grands thoniers utilisent des hélicoptères pour repérer les bandes de dauphins. Quand ils sautent hors de l’eau, leur présence indique celle des bancs de thon dont ils se nourrissent. À l’aide d’une flottille de Zodiac, les pêcheurs mettent alors en place d’immenses filets qui sont ensuite resserrés comme des bourses, capturant d’innombrables dauphins avec les thons. Lorsque ces filets sont finalement tirés à bord par de puissants winchs, les dauphins, qui se retrouvent généralement au-dessus des thons, sont fréquemment broyés dans ces winchs. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 1612-14  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2016, 11:29 PM

Même les volailles cataloguées « élevées en plein air » vivent en vérité dans de sordides hangars où 9 à 12 oiseaux s’entassent sur chaque mètre carré. De temps en temps, on les fait circuler dans un couloir grillagé, ou on les laisse sortir brièvement à l’extérieur pour qu’elles puissent marcher un peu. Nous sommes donc loin des « poules heureuses » que nous vantent les publicités. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 1715-17  | Added on Tuesday, July 05, 2016, 11:55 PM

Singer reconnaît bien sûr que les êtres sont inégaux, notamment du point de vue de leur intelligence et de leur capacité d’agir sur le monde. Il parle d’un principe d’« égale considération des intérêts » qui n’exige nullement que nous traitions les animaux comme nous traitons les humains. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 1729-31  | Added on Tuesday, July 05, 2016, 11:57 PM

L’aptitude à souffrir, et non l’intelligence, est donc la raison principale qui donne à tous les êtres le droit d’être considérés de façon égale. Cela n’implique pas que tous les êtres, humains et non-humains, doivent avoir les mêmes droits en toute chose. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 1740  | Added on Tuesday, July 12, 2016, 11:44 PM

Être végétarien n’est nullement incompatible avec le fait de s’occuper des sans-logis. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 1824-26  | Added on Wednesday, July 13, 2016, 11:25 PM

Pourquoi les animaux posséderaient-ils l’ensemble des mécanismes physiologiques et des substances biochimiques nécessaires non seulement à la perception, mais aussi à l’inhibition de la douleur s’ils n’en ressentaient aucune 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 1843-44  | Added on Wednesday, July 13, 2016, 11:27 PM

Tous ces sentiments sont bien sûr amplifiés chez les êtres humains lorsque s’y rajoutent des constructions mentales qui rendent l’expérience de la souffrance beaucoup plus complexe. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 1857-59  | Added on Wednesday, July 13, 2016, 11:31 PM

Les poissons sont les ultimes « sans voix ». Ils ne crient pas comme les cochons qu’on égorge, ils sont dépourvus d’expressions faciales qui pourraient révéler leurs sensations et nous émouvoir lorsqu’on les tire hors de l’eau et qu’ils se « noient » dans l’air comme nous nous noyons dans l’eau. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 1864-66  | Added on Wednesday, July 13, 2016, 11:32 PM

Il y a quelques années encore, des scientifiques sérieux mettaient en doute la capacité des poissons à ressentir la douleur. Depuis, de nombreuses études ont montré que les poissons ont un système neurologique de détection et de perception de la douleur similaire à celui des vertébrés, et qu’ils produisent les enképhalines et les endorphines qui jouent le rôle d’antidouleur chez les humains. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 2105-6  | Added on Monday, July 18, 2016, 11:39 PM

Comme l’a souligné le philosophe Thomas Nagel, nous n’avons pas la moindre idée de l’effet que cela fait d’être une chauve-souris 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 2305-7  | Added on Thursday, July 21, 2016, 10:39 PM

Être capable de nourrir des préoccupations morales complexes qui concernent un grand nombre d’individus, y compris des personnes lointaines dans l’espace et le temps (les générations à venir par exemple), et qui peuvent s’étendre aux autres espèces est assurément une caractéristique humaine. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 2307-9  | Added on Thursday, July 21, 2016, 10:39 PM

Seul l’homme peut devenir spéciste et seul l’homme peut aussi comprendre qu’il ne devrait pas l’être, puisqu’il n’est pas défendable d’instrumentaliser les autres espèces pour la seule raison qu’elles ne sont pas humaines, si telle est la justification qu’il avance. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 2314-16  | Added on Thursday, July 21, 2016, 10:40 PM

L’antispécisme ne consiste nullement à dire que toutes les espèces sont égales, ont la même valeur et doivent être traitées de la même façon, mais qu’il est blâmable de profiter des capacités qui nous sont propres pour nuire sciemment à d’autres espèces sous prétexte qu’elles ne sont pas humaines, lorsque notre vie n’est pas en danger. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 2336-37  | Added on Thursday, July 21, 2016, 10:42 PM

Pourtant, le fait de vivre sa vie jusqu’au bout et d’en actualiser pleinement le potentiel mérite en soi d’être respecté, à moins de considérer que la vie ne vaut, à aucun moment, la peine d’être vécue. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 2335-37  | Added on Thursday, July 21, 2016, 10:43 PM

Si ce genre d’argument était recevable, il serait acceptable de tuer dans son sommeil, de façon indolore, quelqu’un qui vit seul et ignoré de tous, puisque personne au monde n’en souffrirait. Pourtant, le fait de vivre sa vie jusqu’au bout et d’en actualiser pleinement le potentiel mérite en soi d’être respecté, à moins de considérer que la vie ne vaut, à aucun moment, la peine d’être vécue. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 2453-54  | Added on Tuesday, August 16, 2016, 08:18 PM

Il existe donc bien des cultures animales, même si elles sont différentes des cultures acquises par les humains. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 2747-50  | Added on Tuesday, September 06, 2016, 10:27 PM

Les points communs entre un génocide et une tuerie d’animaux à grande échelle sont la dévalorisation des victimes, la désensibilisation des exécutants et la dissociation mentale qui s’opère en eux, les méthodes d’extermination, la dissimulation des faits par leurs auteurs et le refus de savoir de ceux qui sont en mesure de connaître les faits. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 2924-26  | Added on Wednesday, September 07, 2016, 09:50 PM

Pour reprendre une expression du philosophe Gary Francione, qui prône l’abolition de l’instrumentalisation des animaux, nous souffrons ici d’une véritable schizophrénie morale à laquelle il est de notre devoir de remédier 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 2981-84  | Added on Wednesday, September 07, 2016, 09:57 PM

Pour être végétarien ou végétalien, il suffit de décider d’arrêter de manger les animaux eux-mêmes ou des produits issus de leur exploitation. Une telle décision ne prend qu’une fraction de seconde et il n’est pas difficile de trouver des alternatives aux produits animaliers. Mais on comprend qu’il serait presque impossible, dans le monde où nous vivons, de se priver totalement de soins médicaux classiques. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 3029-30  | Added on Thursday, September 08, 2016, 10:11 PM

Les Européens qui vont à la chasse par plaisir ne sont pas dans la même position que les Eskimos qui tuent pour assurer leur subsistance ou pour empêcher un ours blanc de les dévorer 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 3218-20  | Added on Sunday, September 11, 2016, 06:27 PM

il ne s’agit nullement d’étendre aux humains les sévices que l’on fait subir aux animaux, mais d’étendre aux animaux la compassion que l’on éprouve envers les humains. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 3540-42  | Added on Monday, September 12, 2016, 09:26 PM

De nos jours, les corridas, les numéros de dressage d’animaux sauvages (fauves et éléphants) qui sont encore présentés dans de nombreux cirques et qui, de l’avis des dresseurs eux-mêmes, sont loin d’être aussi anodins qu’ils y paraissent, ainsi que les animaux résignés ou rendus à moitié fous qui sont offerts en spectacle dans certains zoos, ne sont que les reliquats des massacres et des parades de l’Antiquité. 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 3663-64  | Added on Tuesday, September 13, 2016, 08:58 PM

Comme l’écrit Michel Onfray : « Tout goût pour le spectacle de la pulsion de mort révèle le désir de puissance de l’impuissant 
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Plaidoyer pour les animaux (French Edition) (Matthieu Ricard)
- Highlight Loc. 3675-79  | Added on Tuesday, September 13, 2016, 08:59 PM

On s’est donc focalisé sur le taureau, animal suffisamment combatif pour garantir le spectacle, mais pas trop dangereux, puisque le torero a au moins 9 999 chances sur 10 000 de s’en sortir vivant. Imaginez ce qu’il adviendrait de la « supériorité » de l’homme, même muni d’une épée, s’il se trouvait face à un tigre. Le taureau est donc suffisamment agressif — avec un mouton les aficionados n’en auraient pas pour leur argent — mais la victoire de l’homme est quasiment assurée. 
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Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue (Sam Harris)
- Highlight Loc. 484-86  | Added on Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 10:23 PM

While they rightly question every aspect of their “own” Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of “cultural authenticity” and anticolonialism. 
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