Things We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty edited by John Brockman

Bite-sized ruminations by a bunch of folks (mostly scientists - names include Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, and others) about, as title suggests, things they believe but cannot prove. Interesting, and because the individual entries are so short, all extremely accessible. They tackle the big questions, so there's a lot about (intelligent) life elsewhere in the universe, objective reality, religious experience and God, the distinction between humans and animals, the nature of consciousness, the importance of language, the limitations and possibilities of science, the nature of the universe (and reality, time, etc), human nature, evolution and design, and human society - all rather mind-expanding, the ones on subjects that I've studied/thought about as much as those on areas more or less completely new to me.

My favourite is the piece by Donald F Hoffman:

I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Spacetime, matter, and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.

The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars, and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels, and sounds - is a species-specific user interface between ourselves and a realm far more complex, whose essential character is conscious.

It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm; indeed, the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. ...

Hoffman goes on to elaborate these initial claims, and to me they seem intuitively and almost self-evidently correct (a big second step, but that is how it seems to me). The implication is that, as he suggests: "What we lose in this process are physical objects that exist independent of any observer. there is no sun or moon, unless a conscious mind observes them; both are constructs of consciousness, icons in a species-specific user interface." Most of this isn't particularly new to me - Husserl led me down this particular phenomenological garden path years ago. But the metaphor (which is actually quite literal) of the interface is new, and it's most apt.