Are large brains worth it?

"It takes brains to be stupid," says the carton of oat milk in my fridge. Seems relevant.

Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

“We revere the absolute but are bound to the transitory.”  

“...as Stephen Jay Gould summarized it, 'A large brain allowed us to learn…the inevitability of our personal mortality' and 'all religion began with an awareness of death.' But whether religion then took hold because it transformed that awareness into an adaptive advantage is a wholly different question."

"Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment."

"When you recognize that we are the product of purposeless, mindless laws of physics... you recognize that looking out to the cosmos to find some answer... is just facing the wrong direction. At the end of the day, we have to manufacture our own meaning, our own purpose." THIS: https://t.co/HPX4L57F9E

— Maria Popova (@brainpicker) April 25, 2020