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When change seems inevitable and irreversible, can it be controlled to some degree? Can the self remain intact after the mind and body have been Ship-of-Theseus’d into something unrecognizable?
“We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.”
Ever-helpful, unhelpful spy Grandpa used to reflexively say, whether it was washing the dishes or preparing for a fishing trip, “Never skip a step. Skip a step, you’ll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.”
Control took the ant into the fringe of vegetation lining the parking lot and let it crawl from his thumb onto the wood chips there. The ant quickly got its bearings and walked off with purpose toward the green strip of trees that lay between the parking lot and the highway, governed by some sense of where it was and where it needed to be that was beyond Control’s understanding. “So long as you don’t tell people you don’t know something, they’ll probably think you know it.” That from his father, not his mother, surprisingly. Or perhaps not. His mother knew so much that maybe she thought she
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“If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.” A warning from his mother, once upon a time, delivered as if she’d upended a box of spy-advice fortune cookies and chosen one at random.
Because our minds process information almost solely through analogy and categorization, we are often defeated when presented with something that fits no category and lies outside of the realm of our analogies.”
“Yeah, there’s a lot of enabling of each other’s dip-shittery. It’s almost all we’ve got.” “We don’t even understand how every organism on our planet works. Haven’t even identified them all yet. What if we just don’t have the language for it?” “Are we obsolete? I think not, I think not. But don’t ask the army’s opinion of that. A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.” “As a physicist, what do you do when you’re faced by something that doesn’t care what you do and isn’t affected by your actions? Then you start thinking about dark energy and you go a little nuts.”
