“If a cigarette smoker wakes up from a seven-year coma, does he want a cigarette?”

“If we teleport a person’s body, would the mind be left behind?”

“Libet et al. have demonstrated that a ‘person’s’ brain makes a decision to act before the ‘person’ is aware of having decided to act: that is, the brain makes the decision and then informs the person of the decision, who (mistakenly) believes he or she actually ‘made’ the decision.”

“In later journeys to Borneo and the high Arctic, Tibet and the forests of northern Canada, the swamps of the Orinoco delta and the deserts of the Middle East, I found myself increasingly drawn to the wonder of cultural diversity, and especially to those societies that have yet to succumb to the forces of modernization.

“Indeed, one of the intense pleasures of travel is the opportunity to live among peoples who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in the stones polished by rain, recognize its taste in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that nomadic hunters exist, that jaguar shaman yet journey beyond the Milky Way, that the myths of the Athabaskan elders still resonate with meaning, is to remember that our world does not exist in some absolute sense but rather is only one model of reality. The Penan in the forests of Borneo, the Vodoun acolytes in Haiti, the wandering holy men of the Sahara, teach us that there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the Earth. This idea has always filled me with hope.”

“On Christmas Eve 1977 a forty-year-old resident of Kyoto was admitted to a hospital after being poisoned by fugu [puffer fish]. The patient soon stopped breathing, and all symptoms were consistent with brain death. Physicians immediately initiated artificial respiration and other appropriate treatments. These did not help, but twenty-four hours later the patient spontaneously began to breathe. He eventually recovered completely, and later remembered hearing his family weeping over his still body. His senses were unimpaired. He wanted desperately to let them know that he was alive, but he was unable to. ‘That,’ he later told medical investigators, ‘was really hell-on-earth.’”