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The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
Any kind of novelty or excitement drives up dopamine in the brain, and dopamine is associated with romantic love.
Our own relentless search for novelty and social status locks us into an iron cage of consumerism. Affluence has itself betrayed us.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear.
Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.
Therefore, when I considered this carefully, the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view, nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work I had begun.
It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable.
If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn't look like there's very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It's easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are.
Chance alone is at the source of all novelty, all creation in the biosphere.
Human beings are attracted to novelty: to probe the 'adjacent possible.' We didn't stay in the caves. We didn't stay on the planet, and soon we won't stay within the limitations of our biology. We move forward. We transcend our limits. We go to the moon, and we create the Internet.