A cold materialist reads the human mind. These are lines from the lectures collected in NOX: Anatomy of Thought, on the brain as a machine, the invention of gods, the animal underneath, and the accident of reason.
Verbatim, drawn from the recorded episodes. Each line links to the full transcript of the lecture it came from.
There is no ghost in the organ. Every capacity a creature has is written in the meat.
No creature possesses qualities beyond those defined by the structures of its brain or its genome.
The brain is a logical, primitive structure devoid of mystery.
The convolutions, nuclei, and ventricles of the brain encode all the capabilities and potential of the organism.
The banality of their convolutions irrevocably buries hopes for mysteries and souls.
The brainstem and its structure are nothing more than the neural materialization of an ancestral chain's lived experience.
Out of the 85 billion neurons in the human brain, 72 billion belong to the brainstem and its massive, sprawling add-ons.
The supernatural mind, opened on the table, is a standard-issue primate brain.
Within Jesus's head, we find the brain of the one who invented him.
When we lift the horned lid of Satan's skull, we find the most mundane hemispheres, along with an ordinary brainstem and a rather tedious cerebellum.
In inventing another god or demon, people could only sculpt their image from their own concepts.
In culture, geniuses play the same role that saints do in religion.
We are just animals dressing up our instincts in stories.
Religion, ideology, art, they are all just elaborate justifications for the same primal urges.
Strip the poetry and the human is an ordinary scavenger that never left the savanna.
Deep down, we are still animals, and the reality of our nature is a lot less noble than we would like it to be.
The entire history of mankind is the history of an unsuccessful attempt to overcome the fascism rooted in human nature.
In the 19th century, Charles Robert Darwin dipped humanity's proud face into its ancient evolutionary excrement.
Not the apex predator, but the shadowed opportunist, lurking in the chaos of death.
Technologies have not elevated the biological status of humans.
Evolution likes to slap together something crude and then spend hundreds of millions of years endlessly complicating its properties to the point of madness.
Evolution operates at the level of species, not individuals.
These illusions are mere mirages created by social games and cultural constructs.
Thought was not a gift or a summit. It was a patch, wired in from waste.
The evolution of the human brain is an absurdly comical story.
A new brain structure only emerges to serve a new function, and it works exclusively for that function.
A species that never needed reason, never evolved for logic, never had the neurons for abstract thought, yet somehow convinced itself it was the pinnacle of intelligence.
The human brain decided to slap on a cortex long before it had language, reason, or any other so-called intellectual hobbies.
Not because it was special, but because evolution is indifferent.
The debut of reason felt like the sudden appearance of a smoldering, thin thread inside the absolute blackness of the mind.
A permanent state of anxiety became the animal's new baseline, just like the restless, knowing pulse of lust.
The rarest brain is still just tissue, and the myth around it is a comfort for everyone else.
Genius is a scandalous and slippery category, a true brain teaser.
Genius is always a shocking phenomenon, and to those without it, it is as irritating as watching a paralyzed person try to dance.
The very existence of geniuses divides humanity into two unequal parts.
Thanks to the existence of geniuses, even the most hopeless dimwits find solace in belonging to the smartest species.
The word genius encodes a bold dream of one day overturning Darwinism and annulling the verdict that evolution has passed on humanity.