David Eagleman

But I have felt that...

It's difficult to say, given the amount of mystery that we face, to say, okay, well, we've got this all figured out.

And so it's a cold universe and there's nothing but deterministic physics and so on.

We just don't know enough to say that.

That may well be the case.

We just don't know enough to pretend that science has it all figured out.

And so I call myself a possibility.

And that means I'm interested in the possibility space.

In other words, this is the scientific temperament is saying,

What could be going on here?

How did we get here?

What is our purpose here, if anything?

What is happening around here?

And the best way to tackle that is with the tools of science, which means anything gets to be on the table at first, and then we use the tools of science to rule out particular things, like that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and we use the tools of science to open up new folds in the possibility space that we hadn't even thought of before.

But the idea is the scientific temperament always allows lots of hypotheses on the table.

And then we gather evidence to weigh in favor of some of those and against others.

And that's what I think we should be doing.

That's what I call possibilianism.

And I actually presented this

in a TEDx talk many years ago.