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Quote by Andrzej Wronka

“I’m writing these words on February 28th, barely two months after the event. At least I think I am. I can’t be sure when, or even if, it actually happened. Or what really took place. Then again: what is truth, if infinitely many truths can exist at the same time? But let me start from the beginning.”

Quote by Andrzej Wronka

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The Last

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Andrzej Wronka

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“Imaginative humans came together to hunt, farm, trade, and build incrementally sophisticated tools for transportation, communication, productivity, and convenience. ... Tribes and villages became kingdoms and empires, only to later dissolve into the cities and countries of a global civilization. ... Today, we live in concrete jungles, store fruit in fridges, cook oats with microwaves, and carry smartphones in our pockets. Electricity lights up our world, while the energy for it comes from increasingly sustainable sources. Global warming has finally convinced us to grow our food and fuel our activities in ways that do not pollute the planet, exhaust ecosystems, or exploit our fellow animals. We now seek to preserve the environmental stability of the last 10,000 years, during which our species transformed from a few million wandering foragers to nearly ten billion technological titans. Today, we are masters of science, exploring everything from the cosmic to the quantum. We discuss Einstein’s gravity and spacetime relativity, while decoding the molecular mysteries of life and longevity. We fling satellites into orbit, hook computers up to an internet, and seed our society with intelligent programs and robots.”

“There are no doubt brain-states associated with every experience, transcendent or mundane; why, then, should the trivial truth that mystical or contemplative insight is correlated with a distinctive set of neural activities be taken as evidence that such insight is merely a psychological state, without a real object? By that logic, the reality that there’s a brain-state associated with hearing a performance of Bach means that I can’t believe in the objective reality of that music. Whatever the case may be, I know this: to imagine that a “science of mind”—a science of irreducible first-person experience—is possible in terms purely of the third-person facts of neurophysiology, without reference to what mental interiority discloses to itself about itself, is worse than folly. The only “science of mind” that might actually reveal the intrinsic nature of the mental would be something like the contemplative disciplines proper to the great mystical traditions of the world’s religions. There can be no real science of mind that’s not, to put it bluntly, a spiritual science.”