Change, as a rule, is not pleasant. People don’t like it. Having to think about what we have learned to do mindlessly is annoying, like a detour on the road. Of course, after the fact, we are always grateful because change has brought us back to life. This explains whyContinue Reading
Basically, the advertisements we see sell products which have hijacked our dopamine-reward circuits. The dopamine-reward circuit is a mechanism which all animals share. When they need food, or sex, or shelter, they notice familiar landmarks in the landscape which trigger Little Dopamine squirts in the brain. The dopamine feels good,Continue Reading
In some of our landscapes, the same problems occur over and over again. Perhaps our lovescapes make us unhappy, or our workscapes reveal our incompetence. It may be that our pleasurescapes bring out addictive or competitive behaviors. Sometimes our beliefscapes test, rather than inspire, our faith. When things go wrong,Continue Reading
There are higher levels of scientists – namely, mathematicians and theorists – who have extraordinary ability at holding qualia in their minds while resisting the impulse to chase matter. I would argue that, of the two (mathematicians and theorists), the theorist is the superior, and this by way of AlbertContinue Reading
All those eons of evolution tuned us in to the qualia on the surface of things, but the qualia in the mind (which we only began to notice, oh, maybe fifty-thousand years ago at the most), gave us something new: imagination. Imagination revealed to us how all matter forms itselfContinue Reading