Of all the illusions to which human consciousness is prey, death may be the most beguiling. And the most asinine. To conceive of experiencing one's own death presumes a division of body and mind which, you see, was merely the superstition of a darker age. More accurately conceived, death is ...

Hamlet's famous question was thus, from a more modern perspective, ill posed. Because human consciousness is fundamentally and at every level a complex of normal chemical and mechanical processes, we cannot seriously entertain the fantasy of not knowing ourselves. And without an assurance that ...

The unique experience of human consciousness comes of a brain that maps the body of which it is a part with sufficient complexity and nuance. The circumstances that produce such a brain are complicated and a little improbable, but ultimately finite and scientifically ordinary. As consciousness ...

Poetic suicide : a gross underestimation of one's immortality.

Your ordinary laboratory rat is no mean critic of art, if only properly cultivated. Teach him to discriminate a square from a rectangle and reward him for his appreciation of the latter and, very soon, he will become quite a connoisseur of rectangles, preferring rectangles with ever finer ...

Place an ordinary, untrained, hungry chicken in a cage equipped only with a lever that, when depressed, will release a food pellet, and that chicken will try out a multitude of inspired yet ultimately unsuccessful solutions to his dilemma. But the only one that will be imprinted -- that he will ...

A successful liar deceives you with a falsehood. A truly accomplished one deceives you with the truth.