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We must take our sensory experiences seriously but not literally. This is one place where the concept of a sensory desktop is helpful. We take the icons on a graphical desktop seriously; we won’t, for instance, carelessly drag an icon to the trash, for fear of losing a valuable file. But we don’t take the colors…
One of the most general shorthand abstractions that, if adopted, would improve the cognitive toolkit of humanity is to think bottom up, not top down. Almost everything important that happens in both nature and society happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Water is a bottom-up, self-organized emergent property…
Humans are the giraffes of altruism. We’re freaks of nature, able (at our best) to achieve antlike levels of service to the group. We readily join together to create superorganisms, but unlike the eusocial insects we do it with blatant disregard for kinship and we do it temporarily and contingent upon special…