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The Great Cognitive Shift Is An Expansion Of Consciousness From The Perspectival Form Contained In The Lives Of Particular Creatures To An Objective, World-encompassing Form That Exists Both Individually And Intersubjectively. It Was Originally A Biological Evolutionary Process, And In Our Species It Has Become A Collective Cultural Process As Well. Each Of Our Lives Is A Part Of The Lengthy Process Of The Universe Gradually Waking Up And Becoming Aware Of Itself.

Consciousness Is What Makes The Mind-body Problem Really Intractable.

What We Take Ourselves To Be Doing When We Think About What Is The Case Or How We Should Act Is Something That Cannot Be Reconciled With A Reductive Naturalism, For Reasons Distinct From Those That Entail The Irreducibility Of Consciousness. It Is Not Merely The Subjectivity Of Thought But Its Capacity To Transcend Subjectivity And To Discover What Is Objectively The Case That Presents A Problem....thought And Reasoning Are Correct Or Incorrect In Virtue Of Something Independent Of The Thinker's Beliefs, And Even Independent Of The Community Of Thinkers To Which He Belongs. (p. 71)

I Should Not Really Object To Dying Were It Not Followed By Death.

Humans Are Addicted To The Hope For A Final Reckoning, But Intellectual Humility Requires That We Resist The Temptation To Assume That Tools Of The Kind We Now Have Are In Principle Sufficient To Understand The Universe As A Whole.