Recursion

by Blake Crouch

What we think of as the ‘present’ isn’t actually a moment. It’s a stretch of recent time—an arbitrary one.

This is reflected in language. There is no requisite time period for us to use present tense. If you say "I am a doctor", the referent time period could be 5 minutes or 50 years.

“‘It is evident the mind does not know things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them.’”

“Which is, by definition, impossible. No matter how much we understand about how our perceptions work, ultimately we’ll never escape our limitations.”

no one cares about your emotional state as long as there’s no blood involved. Crying on the sidewalk in the middle of the day is no less private than crying in your bedroom in the middle of the night. Maybe it’s because no one cares. Maybe it’s because it’s a brutal city, and they’ve all been there at one time or another.

When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past . . . All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

Someone pass this on to Bryan Johnson