The Strange Order of Things

Beginnings

The profit motive of the drug and instrumentation industries also plays a significant part because the public does need to reduce its suffering and industries respond to that need. The pursuit of profit is fueled by varied yearnings, a desire for advancement, prestige, even greed, which are none other than feelings.

Part I About Life and its Regulation (Homeostasis)

Part II Assembling the Cultural Mind

8. The Construction of Feelings

If there is no distance between body and brain, if body and brain interact and form a organismic single unit, then feeling is not a perception of the body state in the conventional sense of the term. Here the duality of subject-object, of perceiver-perceived, breaks down.

9. Consciousness

[...] mental states naturally feel like something because it is advantageous to organisms to have mental states qualified by feelings. Only then can mental states assist the organism in producing the most homeostatically compatible behaviors.

Part III The Cultural Mind at Work

11. Medicine, Immortality, and Algorithms

Moreover, in the perspective of such thinkers, the discovery that human life is comparable, in its essence, to the life of all other living species undermines the traditional platform of humanism: the idea that humans are exceptional and distinct from other species. This is Harari's apparent conclusion, and if so it is certainly wrong.