You Can’t Handle The Truth: Reality Is *Nothing* Like What We Experience With Our Senses, Argues Cognitive Scientist

“Sure, when we stop and think about it, we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like … Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now?” Rather the opposite, says Donald Hoffman: humans evolved as we did because our brains couldn’t process the world as it is (or not all of it).

Five Years A Slave: When Cervantes Was Captured By Pirates (He Never Got Over It)

“In 1575, after fighting in military campaigns against the Turks in the Mediterranean, the Spaniard was captured by Barbary pirates and taken to Algiers. There, he was kept as a slave for five years. … Cervantes told and retold his own account of enslavement: in plays, poetry and novellas … [and in] the tale told by a captive in Part 1 of Don Quixote.”