Quote of the Week
(January 12, 2026)

The fact that thinking is already present in the only phenomena available to scientific investigation is one of those fundamental truths, easily recognized yet widely ignored, that can change everything. It tells us something about how intimately we as thinking beings are woven into a universe that invested in us powers of thought coordinate with the thinking already inherent in that universe. Or, in a lower-level (molecular) context: it reminds us how intimately the world’s wisdom has been woven into the directed activity through which our bodies, including our brains, have been formed (Chapter 8, “The Mystery of an Unexpected Coherence”).

But, important as thinking is, we have seen that it cannot by itself give us a world. There is also the “something” that thinking illuminates — the unformed contents provided by our senses. If, as we saw above, our senses cannot give us identifiable or nameable or recognizable things without first being informed by thinking, neither can thinking give us any such things without there first existing a sensible content capable of being so informed.

(from Chapter 13, “All Science Must Be Rooted in Experience”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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