I Would Like To Understand Things Better,

We Create An Image Of Who We Are Inside Our Self. The Image Then Becomes Very Deeply Entrenched, And It Becomes The Thing That We Attribute Responsibility To - We Say "i", "i" Did This Because "i" Wanted To, Because "i" Am A Good Person Or Because "i" Am A Bad Person. The Loop Is The Fact That We Represent Our Selves, Our Desires, Hopes, Dreads And Dreams: It Is The Way In Which We Conceive Of Ourselves, Rather Than The Way We Conceive Of Mount Everest Or Of A Tree. And I Say It Exists Entirely In The Loop: The Self Is An Hallucination Hallucinated By An Hallucination.

Perhaps The Problem Is The Seeming Need That People Have Of Making Black-and-white Cutoffs When It Comes To Certain Mysterious Phenomena, Such As Life And Consciousness. People Seem To Want There To Be An Absolute Threshold Between The Living And The Nonliving, And Between The Thinking And The "merely Mechanical," ... But The Onward March Of Science Seems To Force Us Ever More Clearly Into Accepting Intermediate Levels Of Such Properties.

There Has To Be A Common Sense Cutoff For Craziness, And When That Threshold Is Exceeded, Then The Criteria For Publication Should Get Far, Far More Stringent.

Hofstadter's Law: It Always Takes Longer Than You Expect, Even When You Take Into Account Hofstadter's Law

It As If You Took A Lot Of Very Good Food And Some Dog Excrement And Blended It All Up So That You Can't Possibly Figure Out What's Good Or Bad. It's An Intimate Mixture Of Rubbish And Good Ideas, And It's Very Hard To Disentangle The Two, Because These Are Smart People; They're Not Stupid.