“Seventeenth century natural philosophers needed to prohibit the very possibility of divine deception and this prohibition is a forgotten source of the gap that today exists between science and religion. They all believed that God was both their salvation and the master craftsman of the amazing cosmos. Beyond that, they needed God to be silent because only in silence could they find the truths they sought. Finding those truths, it became necessary to believe there had never been anything else but silence.”

‘She calls the current attitude “worst first thinking”: thinking up the worst-case scenario as the knee-jerk response to any situation, rather than a reasonable evaluation of the actual risk. “We’re not allowed to make any distinctions between likely and unlikely.”‘

“So your idea is to drive across America and write about it without talking to a single American?” “Yes,” I said.

‘The question Turing asked is “Can machines think?” But ultimately it’s an operational test for intelligence, not for consciousness. If you have a clever conversation with some guy in another room and after half an hour you can’t decide if it is a computer or a human, well, then you say it’s as intelligent as a human. But the Turing test would not tell me if the machine experiences anything.’

“Still, it occurred to me that, for all the passion I had for my theory, I might be the only person in the world who felt this way. Neurobiologist Robert A. Burton points out in his book On Being Certain that the sensation of being sure about one’s beliefs is an emotional response separate from the processing of those beliefs. It’s something that the brain does subconsciously to protect itself from wasting unnecessary processing power on problems for which you’ve already found a solution that’s good enough. “ ‘That’s right’ is a feeling you get so that you can move on,” Burton told me.”

“Your average 3-year-old can’t quite process the idea that another person can think different thoughts, but a 5-year-old can. And although we know that something happens between the ages of 3 and 5 in that little patch of brain that Rebecca studies, we still don’t know what.”