"Some of us believe that each person's nature is fixed by biology or society, that whatever ambitions we have are built into us by genetics or culture. But even so, our built-in ambitions are more complex and abstract than merely to lead one particular kind of life or another. We have the abstract am"
"Death's central horror is oblivion---the terrifying, absolute dying of the light. But oblivion is not all there is to death; if it were, people would not worry so much about whether their technical, biological lives continue after they have become unconscious and the void has begun, after the light "
"I want to capture that difference by pointing out a distinction between two kinds of reasons people have for wanting their lives to go one way rather than another. First, everyone has what I shall call experiential interests. We all do things because we like the experience of doing them: playing sof"
"But most people think that they also have what I shall call critical interests: interests that it does make their life genuinely better to satisfy, interests they would be mistaken, and genuinely worse off, if they did not recognise.[...] We need the distinction between experiential and critical int"
"On the one hand, a person's critical interests seem very much to depend on his personality. [...] But that appealing idea is hard to reconcile with an even more fundamental conviction we also have---that a person's thinking a given choice right for him does not make it so, that the sometimes agonise"