Word: never
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This incident occurred more than three decades ago, when Dr. Antonio Damasio was a medical student in Lisbon, Portugal, and he has never forgotten it. How was it possible, he wondered, for someone to be there and yet not be there, to be awake and yet not be awake, to be aware of his surroundings and at the same time be oblivious to them? The more Damasio puzzled over what had happened to the patient during an epileptic seizure, the more he felt compelled to confront a much larger question: What is it about the human brain and its networks...
...optimism of Tufts University's Daniel Dennett, who says consciousness will one day be understood as nothing more complicated than a kind of biological software routine, to the outright pessimism of Rutgers University's Colin McGinn. He regards consciousness as "the ultimate mystery, a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel...
...admits he hasn't explained consciousness completely either. Perhaps, he muses, so-called mysterians like Rutgers' McGinn have it right, and a full understanding of consciousness and its origins--like that of life itself--will always elude us. But, he insists, "it's not justified to say we'll never understand consciousness just because there is an explanatory gap right now." Rather, he sees the quest as a beginning. The brain, he firmly believes, holds answers to questions that we have not yet even thought of asking...
There is probably never a good time to ask the question--Tell me, do you consider yourself insane?--but when the time comes, Ted Kaczynski responds without hesitation. "I'm confident that I'm sane, personally," he says. "I don't get delusions and so on and so forth...I mean, I had very serious problems with social adjustment in adolescence, and a lot of people would call this a sickness. But it would have to be distinguished between an organic illness, like schizophrenia or something like that...
...Great Falls, Ted often spent the night at David's apartment. One day, while David was not at home, Ted came across some letters from Linda, whom Ted had never heard David mention. "They were in a drawer," Ted writes, "not lying out in the open, and I knew that he would not want me to read them, but I read them anyway... Why did I do it? I was full of contempt for him, and when you have contempt for someone you tend to be disregardful of his rights...