“It strikes me that although we occasionally carp about Having To Suffer, and moan about never producing real Art, and become despondent or try too hard to compensate, we are indulging in our usual trick of synthesizing something to worry about, and should really be thanking ourselves that we live the life we do. We […]
“‘How long do you think this place is going to stay the way it is now? Ten years? Twenty? Can’t you see how much this place has to alter…in just the next century? We’re so used to things staying much the same, to society and technology––at least immediately available technology––hardly changing over our lifetimes that…I […]
“It’s a no-win argument––that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.” ––A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, pg. 57 “One common misunderstanding is that happiness always means success, […]
“‘There are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, “Do thou,” and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in “Thou shalt.” Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But “Thou mayest”! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature […]
“I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. […]
“Probably most professional philosophers in the field would hold that given your body, the state of your brain, and your specific environment, you could not act differently from the way you’re acting now––that your actions are preordained, as it were. Imagine that we could produce a perfect duplicate of you, a functionally identical twin who […]
This is probably my favorite of the books I’ve read by Edward O. Wilson, although it did not alter my worldview as profoundly as On Human Nature did when I read it back in early 2012. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is an eloquent explication of the ideas and dispositions I hold in highest regard. […]
This is the kind of book I long to be intelligent enough to fully comprehend, although to purport having done so would be to ignore Blindsight‘s unnerving central message. Blindsight is an incredibly dark, thought-provoking tale that is equal parts science fiction, horror, and psychological thriller. Relying on a one-two punch that alternates between a heady […]
We are living through the most overpopulated, wasteful, and polluted moment in human history. In response to the increasing data and alarm regarding the problem of climate change, many people have begun searching for philosophical and practical frameworks to illuminate how we can reduce our participation in environmental destruction and start healing Earth’s depleted ecosystems. Moral […]
James Barrat’s Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era is a disturbing, plangent response to the rosy-minded, “rapture of the nerds” mentality that has recently swept across the futurist landscape. Toeing the line between rational prudence and alarmist hand-wringing, Barrat makes the case not only that advanced artificial intelligence is […]