Consciousness is our gateway to experience: It enables us to recognize Van Gogh’s starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven’s Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness is subjective, personal, and famously difficult to ex...
I believe it to be of particular importance that the scientist have an articulate and adequate social philosophy, even more important than the average man should have a philosophy. For there are certain aspects of the relation between science and soc...
In a 1999 paper, Reiner indicates that his data show "that with time and age, children may well know what their gender is, regardless of any and all information and child-rearing to the contrary. They seem to be quite capable of telling us who they a...
It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will th...
Many of the cataclysmic leadership failures were failures of rationality. The pendulum of leadership development needs to swing back toward the rational: strategy, creativity, foresight, decision-making, and analytics.
We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.
Pop leadership abuts pop psychology, and is very destructive. In no other serious domain of human endeavor (surgery, playing the violin) is the subject distilled down to nice-sounding aphorisms that mean nothing.
Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.
He was a beautiful pagan god with the voice of a serial killer, but that didn’t make him any less god like. It just meant rather than dying in some dank basement or isolated cabin, I’d die bound on an altar as part of some gruesome sacrificial ri...
Perhaps the day will come when Western science is able to confirm the existence of immaterial forces and realms. Compelling research in the field of parapsychology indirectly points to this possibility, yet most people in mainstream science can't bri...
However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiff...
But then, we have science, and with its help we shall discover Truth once more; then we shall accept it in full knowledge. Knowledge is of a higher order than feeling; awareness of life is of a higher order than life. Science will give us wisdom, wis...
People from context cultures tend to view personal bonds and informal agreements as far more binding than any formal contract. People from content cultures don't believe the deal is finalized until everyone has signed on the dotted line. And therein ...
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . . that one of the most deeply human, an...
Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of ...
There are a lot of things animals do that we can't," she says, "like flying and camouflage, and we've adapted, through technology ... It's funny when people say something is natural, or not. Compared with what? Compared with when? It's this vanity of...
The web and its technologies are digital representations of everything we did before in a more private, bigger, faster and more empowering format than ever before.
The feminist challenge was sweeping: it embraced education and occupation, together with legal, political, and social status. It even dared broach the subject of equality in personal, and especially matrimonial, relationships. Such assertiveness was ...
Wizards don’t believe in gods. They didn’t deny their existence, of course. They just didn’t believe. It was nothing personal; they weren’t actually rude about it. Gods were a visible part of narrativium that made things work, that gave the w...
Von außen – und erst recht von innen – sieht der Prozess wissenschaftlicher Forschung ungeordnet und verwirrend aus. Man ist versucht zu glauben, Wissenschaftler seien selber unordentlich und verwirrt. In gewisser Hinsicht sind sie es – das ge...
As when astronaut Mike Mulhane was asked by a NASA psychiatrist what epitaph he'd like to have on his gravestone, Mulhane answered, "A loving husband and devoted father," though in reality, he jokes in "Riding Rockets," "I would have sold my wife and...
