Top Highlights

• How is it that the more able man becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it? This is a paradox that has often been noted, and has sometimes been attributed to a fundamental perversity, a sort of ‘pure cussedness’, in human nature.
• Our increasing ability to manipulate the world does indeed appear somehow connected with its loss of meaning for us.
• I am asking you to consider the facts: that what we experience is mediated by neural tissue, a lot of it in the brain, and that that neural tissue inevitably governs the nature of, indeed places constraints upon, what it is we are able to find in the world, in predictable ways. That's all. It doesn't tell us what we are – or how, or why, we
• are what we are: but it may tell us what we are missing.
• If we take a look at the brain, lying there on the pathologist's slab [fig 1], the first thing that will strike us is that, despite millions of years of evolution, it has remained deeply divided. And that is odd, since the whole purpose of the brain as we understand it is to make connections. How can this be? Evolution would never have sacrificed t...