I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.
I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they're all overweight.
What has always surprised me when I walk into a bookstore is the number of books that you can find that are written with certainty. The authors tell some story as though it's true, but they don't have any evidence that it is true!
The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so differently.
A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.
The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building.
