[This interview with Eagleman by the Guardian](http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/science\/2010\/apr\/04\/david-eagleman-40-afterlives) contains a lot of great bits, many which resonate with my recent thinking. Eagleman is the author of [Sum](http:\/\/futuryst.blogspot.com\/2009\/03\/alternative-afterlives.html), which I greatly enjoyed.<\/p>\n
> I’m using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human \u2013 it turns out that it’s a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.<\/p>\n
This is similar to my philosophy on concept design–tell yourself (and others) that this is the “future” experience, when really that’s just a technique to help you think about what you wish things were like today.<\/p>\n
> Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty…I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.<\/p>\n
As I get older I feel like I “know” less and less. I always expected it to be the opposite, but this feels right.<\/p>\n
> I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism. But, as Voltaire said, “uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position”.<\/p>\n
I’ve often said that my job title is designer, but that what I’m paid to do is tolerate uncertainty. It’s uncomfortable and hard to do, but most important projects require a significant period of uncertainty and very few people are willing to endure that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[This interview with Eagleman by the Guardian](http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/science\/2010\/apr\/04\/david-eagleman-40-afterlives) contains a lot of great bits, many which resonate with my recent thinking. Eagleman is the author of [Sum](http:\/\/futuryst.blogspot.com\/2009\/03\/alternative-afterlives.html), which I greatly enjoyed. > I’m using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human \u2013 it turns out that it’s…more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[345,31,367,369,3,6,379],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creativity","category-design","category-faith","category-futurism","category-personal","category-philosophy","category-science-fiction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wjHJ-ZK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3828"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4952,"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3828\/revisions\/4952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bob.ryskamp.org\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}