“When the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on?”
“The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.”
“Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.”
“Human beings live -- literally live, as if life is equated with the mind -- by symbols, particularly words, because the brain is constructed to process information almost exclusively in their terms.”
“Giants exist as a state of mind. They are defined not as an absolute measurement but as a proportionality. . . . So giants can be real, even if adults do not choose to classify them as such.”
