When Occupy Wall Street and similar protests played out over the past year, the phenomenon looked familiar to Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal: He's seen similar moral outrage over economic inequity expressed by monkeys and chimps. And he thinks we could learn a lesson or two from our fellow primates.

Been there for years myself, welcome to the cloud. This is part of why I'm so awkward away from an internet connection. "Now, after a few years of this, I realize that when I look up from the screen I know almost nothing. And maybe that would be fine if the absent phone numbers and upcoming dates were freeing space for deeper and more introspective thought. But I sense that my addiction to the realtime stream is only making room for the consumption of a faster stream."

"Because of these two books I came up with my current working explanation of death: when you die, you become a fictional character."

"Would a non-humanoid alien, with a different evolutionary history and evolutionary psychology, sexually desire a human female? It seems rather unlikely. To put it mildly."

"You might say that scientists - at least some scientists - are those folk who are in principle capable of enjoying life in the real universe."

"Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empoweri

"My business plan is: 1. Create high-quality content. 2. Tell people about it. 3. Profit."

"It's just the one single reason society doesn't work."

"a group of blind men (or men in the dark) touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one touches a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes on what they felt, and learn they are in complete disagreeme

"Small shifts can catalyze great change. Sometimes you have to back up before you can move forward."

"Habit and familiarity have a great deal (though not everything) to do with what people find disgusting but very little to do with ethics. ... Disgust is good clean fun and provides endless amusement for children, but it's worthless as a moral compass."

"These rules (and their runes) create a scaffold for the brain, which, now able to engage with complex ideas in contemplative solitude as opposed to interlocution, begins to conceive of itself as an individual entity rather than as part of a collective. L

"All the varieties of free will worth having, we have"

"Stephen Colbert's interview of Richard Dawkins author of The God Delusion was excellent."

"No component of the system is itself stable but the entire production locks together to have stable existence. This is how you can manage to persist even though much of you is being recycled by day if not the hour."

"It may yet turn out that the hard problem of consciousness is not so hard after all."

"A functioning democracy requires its citizens to have some connection to reality."

Free will seems to dissolve as you draw away from it - as an individual I don't feel manipulated, but when i look at other people - especially groups of other people, it seems like I can see manipulation going on.

"Churches have given us great treasures. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter."

"A far more dangerous idea is that brains cannot become minds without bodies, that two-way interactions between mind and body are crucial to thought and health, and the brain may partly think in terms of the motor actions it encodes for the body's muscles

"The fact that our existence has no purpose outside that existence is completely irrelevant to the way we live our lives, since we are inside our existence."

"We humans can, and do, make up our own purposes, but ultimately the universe has none."

"And He's not going to create a Universe based on rational laws, then not want us to practice our rationality."

"The four doomed flights of 11th September were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time."

"Our relationships with others are akin to social prosthetics for the mind, argues one leading Harvard psychologist. We’re hardwired to care as much as we are to compete, says another, and the clues lie in the biology of our brains."

"Tears of joy sprang to my eyes seeing this thought so clear and so far ahead of its time (400BC)."

Need to read more Gurdjief

"Anthropic reasoning, the theory of how to detect, diagnose and cure the biases of observation selection effects, is a philosophical goldmine."