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"From the perspective of neuroscience, personal identity is what happens when the brain forms of a model of the environment that includes a first-person perspective and narrative history. Eric Kandel, lead editor of the textbook Principles of Neural Science, and winner of a Nobel Prize for work on the neural basis of memory, calls memory the “neural basis of individuation.” And it is. For without memory, we could not each carry around a unique sense of self, formed from a differentiated life history. If everyone on the planet woke up one day with amnesia, human beings would be a herd of mostly undifferentiated people. Without the ability to distinguish one person from another, or remember unique histories or events, everyone becomes a vague blur of humanity. In addition to our sense of unique personal history, the brain also maintains a model of other people. “Theory of mind” in cognitive science refers to the brain’s ability to model and track the goals, beliefs, and behavior patterns of other human beings around us in a social context. With a little introspection, this model of others can extend to ourself. As one comedian quipped: “How can I know what I think until I hear what I say?” Because everyone in society carries around a model of themselves and the others they know, all the brains in human society collectively comprise a substrate for the distributed representation of human identity. Our identity is shaped not only by our own beliefs about ourselves, but by what others think of us as well. Social roles are collectively determined, and personality is shaped by how others treat us as well as are predisposition to a certain character and temperament. And lastly, while personal identity feels unique, unified, and permanent, it is not. Identical twins are often confused. In institutions, people are identified by role (e.g. sales representative for the western region) while the actual person may change. And someone’s personality can change with mood. In children, we see personal identity form, and in senior dementia, we see it unravel."

"We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create."

"The human mind seeks explanations; and now that we know how to find them, we are not going to stop voluntarily. Here is another misconception in the Garden of Eden myth: that the supposed unproblematic state would be a good state to be in. Some theologians have denied this, and I agree with them: an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death."