Massimo Pigliucci

Yeah, it was a very disturbing episode, which thankfully has not repeated itself.

Basically, I was there trying to write an email to my students, and all of a sudden I realized that I...

My fingers were hitting the keyboard, but I wasn't writing what I thought I was writing.

I did not know what I was writing.

So I called my wife and I said, you know, I think there's something wrong here.

And we went immediately to the emergency room.

They couldn't find anything wrong.

Neither cardiologists nor neurologists could find anything wrong.

But nevertheless, it had happened.

And so that was a wake-up call.

that there is also your mind that it's not up to you, right?

So one of the things that the Stoics insisted, as we said, was that your decision-making, your ability to make sound decisions, that's up to you.

But even they understood that that's only provisional on the fact that your mind works more or less normally.

At some point, it might not, right?

So they put me in an emergency room, which means it was somewhat crowded.

You know, there was no privacy on it.

But I did have my iPad and I did have a charger.

And the first thing I did was to open meditations and discourses and the letters of Seneca and remind myself of, you know, what is it that these people are telling me that is so important to me, that is so meaningful to me.

Right now, I'm going through a crisis where I clearly have very little control.

I don't, there's not much I can do here, right?