34 Quotes by Jim Holt

I find it hard to swallow the notion that the world is improved by extra suffering. And that goes for a lot of Christian doctrine. Jones commits a crime, so you expiate the evil by nailing Smith to a cross and it’s all better. – John Leslie.

Bertrand Russell recounts in his autobiography that as an unhappy adolescent he frequently contemplated suicide. But he did not go through with it, he tells us, “because I wished to know more of mathematics.

It was in the early Renaissance that the art of the joke was reborn, and the midwife was a man called Poggio.

Dehaene marveled at the fact that mathematics is simultaneously a product of the human mind and a powerful instrument for discovering the laws by which the human mind operates.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

In his version of the theory, information becomes conscious when certain “workspace” neurons broadcast it to many areas of the brain at once, making it simultaneously available for, say, language, memory, perceptual categorization, action planning, and so on. In other words, consciousness is “cerebral celebrity,” as the philosopher Daniel Dennett has described it, or “fame in the brain.

The total absence of humor from the Bible,” Alfred North Whitehead once observed, “is one of the most singular things in all literature.