Another way to put the point is to say that we carve up the fundamental data, conceived in the most general terms as events of interactions between events, according to our needs and interests at our scale.....Problem-the fact that we are the kind of creature we are, constituted to deal with existence at the scale we occupy relative to the rest of the universe. We are not natively endowed with the cognitive structures that make superpositions of quantum states seem natural. Our cognitive capaci ties organize the world into causally interactive spatio-temporal individuals with determinate properties
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These aspects of the history of empire and colonialism touch only the question of their beginning. What followed, in the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, in centuries of slavery itself, and in the subjugation of entire populations in almost every corner of the world, is a tragic tale indeed. But reconfiguring the beginning of this tale not as a glorious achievement of civilization over savage or primitive peoples and places but as invasions, and invasions that were bitterly resisted, is a major step to refocusing how the past is to be understood
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The World is inside the brain
It is a matter of utmost wonder how vision occurs. In normal conditions a two-dimensional pattern of irradiations of the retina at the back of one's eye-photons striking the retina and stimulating its constituent rods and cones to fire - prompts a sequence of events whose outcome is a Technicolor movie of a three-dimensional world arrayed in depth outside and around one's head. We seem to see through our eyes as if they were windows to a world outside us. But fact the world is inside the brain, and mostly at the back of the brain; and everything we experience-buses, spiders, teacups, and the winter wind-consists of electrochemical-action potentials.
The optic nerves leave the eye from about the middle of the retina, making a blind spot- the foved - which we do not notice because, the brain helpfully fills in the missing bit from the surrounding information.
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To say in this way that minds are not only brains is not-to empha- size the point again - to intend anything non-materialistic by this remark; minds are not some ethereal spiritual stuff à la Descartes. What it means, rather, is that minds are the product of interactions: between brains and other brains, and between brains and the natural environment. As essentially social animals, the brain-brain interac- tions, and the complex social reality they jointly constitute, are probably the most significant environment for most people. People are nodes in complex networks from which their mental lives derive most of their content. That an individual mind is, accordingly, the product of interaction between many brains is not something that shows up directly on an fMRI scan. The historical, social, educa- tional, and philosophical dimensions of the constitution of individual character and sensibility are vastly more than the electrochemistry that an individual brain generates by itself without external input.
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Understanding how much we know, and how great is the ignor- ance exposed by our increased knowledge, is valuable in helping to keep the connections in view
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The carpet of divine inscrutability is always a good place to sweep difficulties under, and the kind of manoeuvre in which it con- sists is a mark of irrational belief in its own right.
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