You're standing at a crossroads, genuinely unsure which path to take. Information flows through your mind in the form of memories, projections, and conflicting desires. The deliberation feels like something. There's a distinctive texture to weighing options, to the gradual crystallization of preference, to the moment you finally decide.
This feeling seems undeniable. Yet its relationship to the physical firing of neurons in your brain remains deeply puzzling. Why doesn't all this information processing happen "in the dark," without any inner felt quality? This is what philosopher David Chalmers called the "hard problem" of consciousness, and it's supposedly the deepest mystery in science.
I think the hard problem is asking the wrong question. And... (read 1360 more words →)
My favorite book in the past was "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. It could also be subtitled "Ten Different Ways the World Could End." Volcanoes, meteors, plagues, if you think about it, the world is always one step closer to the end. Around that same time, I was super worried about climate change and felt that the end was really near, to the point of avoiding going down to the coast to avoid the risk of being caught in a tsunami. Well, there was no tsunami (at least not here in Brazil), and the world didn't end (yet).
To deal with this, I created a phrase that is also... (read more)