23
" red lust, power, hunger, or excitement; yellow jealousy or happiness; orange comfort, warmth, or fun; green envy, harmony, or good taste; blue competence, quality, or masculinity; pink sincerity, sophistication, or femininity; purple power or authority; brown ruggedness; black grief, fear, sophistication, or expensiveness; white purity, sincerity, or happiness. "
― Donald D. Hoffman , The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
24
" What do we want in a scientific theory of consciousness? Consider the case of tasting basil versus hearing a siren. For a theory that proposes that brain activity causes conscious experiences, we want mathematical laws or principles that state precisely which brain activities cause the conscious experience of tasting basil, precisely why this activity does not cause the experience of, say, hearing a siren, and precisely how this activity must change to transform the experience from tasting basil to, say, tasting rosemary. These laws or principles must apply across species, or else explain precisely why different species require different laws. No such laws, indeed no plausible ideas, have ever been proposed. "
― Donald D. Hoffman , The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
27
" The German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz grasped the mystery in 1714: “It must be confessed, however, that Perception, and that which depends upon it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is to say, by figures and motions. Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain Perception. "
― Donald D. Hoffman , The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
28
" Male jewel beetles, Julodimorpha bakewelli, have a thing for beautiful females.1 The males fly about, searching for females, which are shiny, dimpled, and brown. Recently, some male primates of the Homo sapiens species have been driving through the beetle’s haunts in Western Australia and littering the outback with emptied beer bottles, known as “stubbies.” As it happened, some of the stubbies were shiny, dimpled, and just the right shade of brown to catch the fancy of male beetles. Forsaking real females, the male beetles swooned over stubbies with their genitalia everted, and doggedly tried to mate despite glassy rebuffs. (A classic case of the male leaving the female for the bottle.) Adding injury to insult, ants of the species Iridomyrmex discors learned to loiter near stubbies, wait for the befuddled and priapistic beetles, and then devour them, genitalia first, as they failed to have their way. "
― Donald D. Hoffman , The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
35
" Activity in a region of the brain called the postcentral gyrus correlates with conscious experiences of touch. The neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield reported in 1937 that stimulating this gyrus with an electrode in the left hemisphere prompted his patients to report conscious experiences of touch on the right side of the body; stimulating the right hemisphere led to feelings of touch on the left side of the body.13 The correlation is systematic: nearby points on the gyrus correspond to nearby points on the body, and regions of the body that are more sensitive, such as the lips and fingertips, occupy more real estate on the gyrus. Stimulate the gyrus near the middle of the brain, and you feel it in your toes. Slide the electrode along the gyrus, stimulating at ever more lateral points, and the feeling, with a few exceptions, slides systematically up the body. The exceptions are interesting. The face, for instance, resides next to the hand on the gyrus. The toes are next to the genitals—a fact perhaps relevant to foot fetishes, as V. S. Ramachandran has suggested.14 "
― Donald D. Hoffman , The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes