I write with teenagers in mind..

Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?.

Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory..

A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself..

The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it..

I cant see any great evidence that humans have any ability to access anything other than the material world. Beyond that, who knows, but theres no go….

Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host..

In this environment it was a simple matter for The Republic to maintain its structure. People did as they were told because they were working togethe….

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kants idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern p….

This is always the problem with building heroes. To keep them pure, we must build them stupid. The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and ….

Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. Its very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God a….

Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect..

In the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fea….

The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them..

Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in….

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really won….

Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our val….

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism..

I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smi….

Sometimes, even the very best course of action fails..

I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed..