Sublime

Adams is the author of On the Genealogy of Color. He believes the topic of color is the most concrete way to consider the question of how much—or how little—our experience with reality is shared with the experience of other people.

Like the New Atheists, their story has two steps, and the first step is the same: a diverse set of cognitive modules and abilities (including the hypersensitive agency detector) evolved as adaptations to solve a variety of problems, but they often misfired, producing beliefs (such as in supernatural agents) that then contributed (as by-products) to

Since we are all One, the argument goes, individuality is an illusion—necessary, perhaps, in the early stages of our development, but ultimately to be outgrown if we are to reach our optimal potential.15 If the belief that I exist as a separate entity is an illusion, surely it is my illusion, which means that in some form I exist. Even if we wanted

do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand.

How can we make sense of these gradations of moral responsibility when brains and their background influences are in every case, and to exactly the same degree, the real cause of a woman’s death?

His name was Jean-Paul Sartre. He looked at Descartes’s statement “I think, therefore I am” very deeply and suddenly realized, in his own words, “The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks.”

“No robot is as sophisticated as an insect.” Her point is that insect nervous systems have evolved to pull off complex behaviors in the simplest possible ways, and robots show us how simple it is possible to be. If we can program them to accomplish all the adaptive actions that pain supposedly enables without also programming them with consciousnes