Ironically, when you compare people to people, it can be less clear than comparing people to animals.

For example, let's say in society A, rich people pay less in tax, can invest more in the stock market, and consequently certain businesses do better and the shop fronts are more attractive. There is a downside: homeless people can be seen panhandling in every plaza.

In society B, the rich pay more in tax, there's a bit less investment in the stock market, some businesses do worse, and the shop fronts look less attractive. However, there are no homeless people. They all have homes and can afford food, and some have gotten steady jobs.

If someone claimed that the nicer shop fronts and other perks in society A were appealing but were effectively paid for by the poor, who became homeless, the riposte would no doubt be that the poor/homeless people may be unfortunate but aren't really earning or paying for much either way. It is the rich who are paying to support the poor in society B.

But imagine if the negative side effect of society A's perks, instead of homelessness, were the loss of many wild places and the extinction of many species. Could the same riposte be made?

We'd see the suffering and death of wild creatures as a valid form of payment: they were paying for something, a consequence of more attractive store fronts and a few businesses doing better. This might give us more pause.

It should give us as much pause when those suffering are human.

There are ways of thinking that are more customary, and many of those are more in keeping with how we have evolved to think (generally with action immediately at hand).

When you diverge from how thinking is usually done and how our brains are evolved to do it, expect some turbulence. The flow will not be entirely laminar. There will be wrinkles and crinkles and jags and eddies verging into cyclones and other structures you don't recognize at all.

This may seem, to others, even to you, as unnatural and therefore automatically faulty.

Don't fall for that. Thinking has no prerequisite as orderly and normal and sightly.

When you've learned some area "well enough," you'll find efficient ways to keep lucid track of your path and "show your work" (for others or your later self). This is excellent news, but try not to assume that laminar flow is the *only* way or even always the *best* way.

There has always been something broken about the economy, but this has not always been so absolutely obvious. Today we have more data, more research, more math, more anecdotes, more votes. Those who would impede progress point to how much worse it has been. No doubt. But every person who dies or suffers unnecessarily is more than a statistic. If your child dies of cancer they didn't need to get, cancer they got because perhaps it was more profitable to allow them to get it, how reassuring is it that some things about our economic system are better than they used to be? What matters to you is that your child died of cancer and they didn't need to get it, and there are people in your society calling this a necessary evil when it isn't necessary.

Most of us like the fantasy that if we stop thinking, or stop thinking so much, and let things flow naturally, everything will turn out fine. In reality, sometimes the first impulse is the best, other times the greatest deliberation is best, there are also many spaces in between, and I know of no recipe for telling reliably which situation is which.

In Macbeth, William Shakespeare's rapidly reversing hero loses what he considered a good opportunity (to wipe out a competitor). In a flash of enlightenment, he decides to hesitate no more. Instead, he will now put into effect his first impulse immediately, before the moment can fly off. First order of business: send soldiers over to the castle of one of his commanders in order to kill everyone inside, including women and children. Always go with your gut. That's what his gut tells him, and he obliges. This turns out to be too much even for Lady Macbeth, who'd helped his ambition goad him into his first murder. And the "flash of enlightenmnt" is actually the downfall of both. Only the most craven of cronies follow them from there. Soon they are utterly disgraced and - well, dead.

We all know Macbeth shouldn't have acted that way, whether he considered it "genuine" or "brave" or "his true self" or anything else. But if it really was what felt natural in that moment, how do we distinguish? Any list of moral injunctions quickly becomes simply a list. "Always follow your instincts EXCEPT" is not in the spirit of "always follow your instincts," and "be your true self EXCEPT" is not in the spirit of "be your true self."

Our brains are highly parallel, made of about 86 billion neurons running side by side, communicating sporadically (for them) but extensively. We cannot describe 86 billion lines of thought at once, however simple each might be. Our senses and instincts supply us with rapid interpretations and small sets of options tuned to these. Often this works relatively well, and experience improves the auto-interpretations and sets of options. But we must make ourselves aware that the system works via zillions of shortcuts that result in many biases. "I always follow my gut" can only mean "I'm quite biased and could be less so."

Various lines of research suggest that when we make decisions holistically - by intuition, instinct, feeling - rather than deliberatingly and logically, we often make better decisions. When I say "often," I should probably say "very often" or even "usually." As mentioned earlier, 86 billion lines of thinking can't really be tracked at once. Even if each is highly fallible and nigh nonsensical, the sum of their efforts may actually be quite good. This, in part, is the fabled value of believing in yourself, trusting your instincts, and so on.

It's also, I would argue, a lot of the value of "having faith," even in a religious sense. One function of religion, and a core one, has most likely been giving people a sort of permission to worry less and let things flow. The religion provides a set of pointers - an eightfold path, ten commandments, five pillars, mystery of the way with social commentary to boot, etc - to keep "just let things flow" from becoming too problematic the way it did for Macbeth.

This is useful, but I would argue that it is not the end of the story.

A great deal of what Edgar Poe's detective Dupin called "ratiocination" - in other words, thinking deeply and logically - may be exactly what the doctor called for. Science has roundly disproved the notion that mere mystery, mere trust, mere acting natural, was all we could ever need. It turns out figuring shit out is hard work, and that kind of "overthinking" is tremendously useful both for individuals and for society.

More recently, Barack Obama was a proponent of the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I haven't read it (yet), but I gather it's about this very topic. Sometimes our best bet is to turn off explicit "thinking" and go with the parallel votes of our parliament of neurons. Other times, the best bet is to break things down, break things down some more, assess, weigh, discuss, second guess, third guess, gather more clues, filter them for reliability, and on and on, practically as much as you can bear and perhaps a little more; don't overlook the power of outsourcing.

Another book I haven't read and should is The Wisdom of Crowds. We all know mob rule is hardly ideal, or most of us anyway (I won't speak for the anarchists), but there are certainly times when groups of people, just average people, are likely to do better than any one person, even a panel of experts. How can we tell the difference? It's a related problem. It's again parallel versus serial thinking, group versus individual. Multiple lines versus one step at a time.

The power of parallelism explains why instinct and crowds often know better than careful analysis or experts. But the power of parallelism is not magic. It is very much within the realm of science. It is not infinite. It is not immune to study.

Just because going on instinct often works out, and in some situations might even be relied on to work better than trying to use logic, does not mean that this approach is always better. Nor does it mean the parallel paths could never be split out into single chains of logic. We should not, in my opinion, turn it into a religion. Windex may be better at cleaning your windows than alternatives you've tried; you might even have some research backing that up; but please let's refrain from gathering at altars to Windex.

For some of you, this might give another angle on why I object to certain kinds of popular advice - along the lines of you must be confident, stop caring what anyone thinks, always trust your gut, just be yourself, etc. These directives help by putting us into parallel frames of mind, but shutting off logic is far from a panacea, and sometimes - let's remember Macbeth a moment, again - it's an atrocious idea.

Trump's problem is less that he's insecure than that he's too constantly confident. People who believe confidence is equivalent to goodness or admirability have trouble recognizing that the Trumpian kind, the vaguely magnetic and vaguely disgusting hubris that make people like him "successful," is, nevertheless, an *excess* of confidence rather than, per se, toxic insecurity. Chalking the negative consequences up to low self-esteem is a rationalization.

Parallelism is not always the answer, just as trying to use logic is not always the answer.

So far I have attempted to - and perhaps have - cracked the "sacred cow" of "always go with your gut" and related urgings to get married to parallelism and only parallelism. But what can replace it, other than a creeping worry that whichever way we approach a problem, we're doing it wrong?

Well, I cited two books that might have useful suggestions I don't know about.

Very approximately, it's art versus science. If I'm improvising music, I go with my instantaneous feelings; that's a vibe I cultivate, and the more I do, the better my playing seems to get (more or less). Something very similar seems true of dancing. These are modes of self-expression. There isn't really a wrong way to play, and provided you aren't hurting anyone, there isn't really a wrong way to dance. Trusting your own sense makes your movements more coherent, and this tends to make them more elegant and emotional as well. On the other hand, how you feel really makes no difference to whether your math work is correct.

Yet this does not mean no physics is in art and no feeling is in math. The Yin-Yang isn't a terrible representation of parallel/serial dualism. My spontaneous music would be much worse if I hadn't, in other moments, slaved over chords and scales and principles of harmony and which note is the "right" next note in this famous piece I love and so on. Meanwhile, my math wouldn't math if I didn't use my imagination. Mathematicians' brains look a lot like jazz musicians' brains when they're at work. Left-brain versus right-brain is too simple.

Are we talking about a matter of opinion? Something subjective? Which job or college or club is "right" for you? Parallel is more indicated. What about something objective? Something that just is, regardless of how anyone feels about it? Serial is more indicated.

Most of life is some combination.

To let things flow, it really helps not to be worrying, and so as not to be worrying, we may make general reassurances to ourselves that are not, in point of fact, really true. "Everything will be fine!" When has that actually been true overall? "God is protecting you!" Is he, now? Probably not particularly. Take a look at other lives. Is God protecting them? I see a lot of suffering and death, much of it radically unfair, so unfair it almost seems to be rubbing the point in to us all that the universe insists on not being fair. That doesn't feel like godly protection.

Yet we tell ourselves these comforting things to help our minds settle into parallel operations that often work out quite well for us, as they evolved to.

The view above seems, to me, more detailed, more plausible, and more explanatory than what I hear day to day. It is a result of thinking both fast and slow.

In some ways, religion can be explained by one simple thing: communication is extremely important for humans. To decipher messages, our brains are closely attuned to correspondences. When certain flavors of pattern are detected, we try to read what is being said to us. These patterns may show up - we'd then call them coincidences - when no one is speaking. Chance will produce some naturally. Our brains are still triggered, on this primordial level, to search for a message. We feel as if someone is talking to us, even watching us, when no one is there.

It's the same broad class of phenomena as deja vu: you didn't actually experience an exactly matching situation before, but that *feeling* has been triggered. Deja vu seems to happen when an *element*, some small piece, of the situation is familiar but you can't identify which one; a sense of familiarity can then infuse and even overwhelm the gestalt. Similarly, coincidences that make us wonder whether they were somehow intended can give us the conviction that they *were*. Therefore, the feeling goes, *someone* must be there to have *intended* them for us. Someone extremely highly informed and aware of everything, to be able to arrange for this special moment, this message we have received from beyond.

Imagine you're walking in the woods. You hear a sharp rustle behind you. What's more evolutionarily sensible:

1) to assume no one is there

2) to assume someone is there

If you guessed 2, I think you got the right answer. We evolved to *assume*, for safety or other important reasons, that someone is there when we experience certain categories of sensation.

We know some of these will happen at random without anyone being there. And we can posit that evolution will have given zillions of people the *feeling* that someone was there when no one was there.

We can also guess that some of those people will continue to believe their initial hunch, even when no clear evidence follows.

I often think of the wind. The wind will have been one of the phenomena *most* responsible for giving creatures - many animals before us, not just us - the *feeling* that someone was there when no one was there. It makes good evolutionary sense to be able to filter this well, but wind is highly variable and "inventive," so it'll fool *anyone* some of the time.

Now imagine you are a deer, or a monkey. You don't have the same critical thinking skills. Maybe when you hear the wind, or the sharp rustle, and you turn around, your initial feeling is that someone is there, but then when you see nothing more, you simply assume they have left and you move on with your day.

That is, you might not have particularly clear thinking about how it works. And, contrary to the usual assumptions, you, as an animal, might have rather an animistic view of nature. That is, you might well think the wind and rain and streams and light above and so on are changes possessed of a certain amount of sentience, like yours or even greater. They might self-evidently be spirits. Or gods.

I suspect a number of animals have feelings we might call religious.

Or maybe our hyperspecialization in communication enhances this phenomenon and sets us apart, gives us much more of a feeling of hiding sentiences.

I have a sympathetic view about all this. I too have such feelings, and they're interesting. And am I a perfect gauge of when there is and there is not someone there? No. I'm also limited in how much I can say for sure. My filter and everyone else's is finite. It cannot be perfect.

But that just means I could be wrong about anything and so could you.

The argument I'm making here could be extended, but I think it's sufficient to explain a lot.

The usual view of the political spectrum is this kind of smooth dichotomy, almost a yin-yang, an emblem of balance. There's one side, there's the other side, there's a lot in the middle, and at long last there's the "horseshoe theory" connection between the two far ends, almost like a wormhole.

There are several problems with this view.

1) Politics isn't unidimensional. There are more dimensions, several very well known and influential.

2) Even if we highlight and zoom in on this conservative-liberal essence, it's probably not accurate to represent the idea as a single variable on a spectrum.

3) Depicting conservative-liberal as a spectrum implies that the ends are complementary and equally valid.

What happens when 3 fails, for example when one end of the spectrum develops an aversion to information, science, education, empathy, etc?

Now you've got two sides, still, but one of them is frequently or largely wrong. Yet there's this illusion that both have a lot to offer, even are equally valid.

I'm for equality and egalitarianism, but I'm not for telling people their delusions are real.

Color makes up so much of vision, yet it seems mnemonic. For example, this red colander from the dollar store and these red apples near it are about the same color, but the similarity is superficial. What makes the fruit skin red and the plastic red are not the same. While the redness of the apples tells me a smidge about ripeness, the redness of the colander tells me nothing of the sort; it's a decoration. The colander is red for a sensory pleasure of redness. We seem to use color to help us distinguish among items, but not, day to day, to tell us in absolute terms what they comprise.

When we go for a walk and look at things, their colors often tell us very little. If we were more scientific, the colors might help us identify some materials on a molecular level. But the daily palettes of colors in themselves do not. Objects that reflect red do not seem to share anything else with each other, in general.

When we look out into the universe, the overview is a little different. Wavelengths are our best clues to what elements and compounds our telescopes pick up. The complexity of materials we can infer far out there is lower and we rely on staples like hydrogen and water and glycine.

Around us here on Earth, colors help us (like thumbprints) to sort objects and materials, yet tell us little to nothing about their character. White may evoke purity for some, oppression for others; even for the same people and same items, these reactions may be spelled at different times. When I see blue sky and blueberries, the similarity of hue tells me nothing, so far as I can be sure. Yet I know that clear daytime skies and the light dusty patches on those berries look similar - despite, I think, having nothing in common beyond a relatively small wavelength gap.

A price tag does not accurately measure the value of anything.

Most of us accept this on some level, yet we spend lots of time living as if prices do accurately reflect value.

And some of us are deceived entirely. There are monetary fundamentalists among us.

It isn't that we shouldn't have prices or money, but given that neither actually mirrors value - does not reflect it either accurately or precisely - it is dangerous to encourage a *full* illusion otherwise. That wouldn't be like an illusion in the movie theater, where you can forget you're watching a movie, then five minutes later walk out, step into your car, and drive away, no crazier than before. When we believe money truly mirrors value, some truly horrible things happen: children starve, diseases aren't treated, people freeze sleeping on the street, etc.

People make a big deal about not caring what anyone thinks, and then they become spiteful dolts over the silliest things. It's as if what they really want is to warn others not to care what they think, so they can opine recklessly in reaction to others. The old two-way street clogs up. Many seem, by this prosaic "not caring" heroism, to be admitting their own opinions tend toward jerks of the knee.

I care what people think, and that's in part because my thoughts are worth something; I want people to care what I think in turn, given that I care what they think.

It isn't that *I* think it, or that I *think* it, but that I have put a lot of care into the thought. That is why I think others should care, and it is why I care.

When there's some issue that's polarized, people tend to model this mentally in "black and white," ie, binary. That mistake drives a lot of polarization. And it usually is, in fact, a mistake.

I'd say when you're considering A or B, it would be much better to think of it as a qubit rather than a bit.

It isn't ALL A, NO B versus ALL B, NO A, usually. Not necessarily. It could be A. It could be B. It could be A and B in different amounts or at different times (or for different entities or goals). It could be neither A nor B. It could be 50% A, 1% B. It could be 100% A, 100% B. It could be 0% A, 0% B. Get it? This is how qubits work.

Even if the reality is 0% A, 100% B, it helps to understand why A might appear true, might seem like a more compelling explanation, might be easier to understand or remember. Just as we shouldn't think only in binary, it's also true that when we explain why an incorrect view is maintained by some people, we shouldn't only ascribe malicious motives, or only ascribe innocent ones.

When you smash particles together, sometimes you get bigger particles. In effect, this is how all the elements are formed by stars.

It doesn't seem counterintuitive to me that when you smash *enough* together, what you get is new spacetime. In other words, spacetime would be a little analogous to diamond versus charcoal - smoosh together enough under enough pressure and heat, and you get this special result - not just a new form of matter, this time, but spacetime itself.

That's what I think. Black holes synthesize spacetime, and then all that stuff that fell together bounces out into the new spacetime created, and it looks - or can look - kinda like what we see around us in the universe.

It's only one (cosmogonic) hypothesis but I've never seen one that makes more sense to me.

Bonus 1: The math of black holes says that spacetime inside the event horizon is stretched just about infinitely, so the volume inside is much larger than the volume (as seen from) outside.

Bonus 2: When scientists estimate the amount of mass-energy in the observable universe and put it into the equation for the event horizon of a black hole, they get a radius that's about as big as that of the current observable universe. (That seems a little tricky or coincidental, though, because the observable universe is expanding fast, yet its mass-energy is believed to be constant. However, maybe all is not lost for that line of argument, because while the universe is expanding, so is the observable universe - that is, over time, we will catch photons from parts of the universe we cannot yet observe. If the correspondence between estimated mass-energy within the observable universe and radius of observation were to tighten up with better data and stay consistent over time, that would seem like a strong argument.)

Have you ever tuned a musical instrument? Take a guitar, for example. You play two adjacent strings. If you fret the lower, bassier string in the right place (generally the 5th fret, with a single exception - don't worry if this makes no sense - on the B string, which is usually fretted in the 4th position to tune the next string to E rather than F), the two strings should play the same note. Now, they will not actually sound the same. The strings are different thicknesses and they're positioned differently on the fretboard, all of which will lead to different overtones. Even though the resulting sounds *will* be different, almost everyone will be able to tell that the notes are the same, and typically they won't be aware of those little sonic (overtone) differences in a performance.

Until they have to do the tuning themselves. Then it can be difficult - much like hearing that a sung note was hit (or not) versus singing it oneself (which takes practice).

What usually happens is that you play the two strings together (appropriately fretting the lower one for the same note) to compare the sounds, then you adjust the higher string until both strings sound the same - which you can feel as a sort of relaxation, as the two sounds stop clashing and merge. But you won't be sure. So then, guess what? You intentionally mess up your work: you retune that same string a little higher or lower, until it definitely sounds out of whack. And you do the same in the opposite direction, going out of tune on the other end.

Basically, you figure out what position to turn the tuning nut to so that the string is definitely too high, and then on the other side, what position is definitely too low. Now you have a tolerance range. In between those two out-of-tune angles of the nut (amounts of rotation, similar to clock hand positions), you have some wiggle room. Some of that wiggle room, if you pay close attention, will also sound a bit out of tune. But just hearing the two ways your tuning can be wrong (too high, too low) brings immediate clarity to the process. And in a pinch, you can simply turn the nut to about the middle of that range, a trick that's unlikely to fail. It will sound surprisingly good and solid and tuned, simply because you picked the spot halfway between "definitely too high now" and "definitely too low now."

This sounds very specific, doesn't it?

What if I told you that much or most of life is something like this tuning process?

The universe is made of signals - waves - cycles - circles - orbits - vibrations.

Almost everything is tuning.

When you learn something, your neurons are tuning.

Does it look like the two strings of a guitar, and the too-high, too-low, find-the-middle-of-those process? Not outwardly. But inwardly? Maybe.

Hierarchy is useful for getting stuff done. But - and this is the part some cads forget - it is a game. There is virtuality to it. You're at the top of one hierarchy and at the bottom of another. And it's by agreement, not by default or by divine decree. Some people think they're at the top of every hierarchy. That's called being stuck up, but it's even worse than what it's called. In some ways it's good that #45 has demonstrated so painfully to most people alive how hideous it is to believe you are at the top of every hierarchy. No one is. No one's even close. That makes thinking you are all the more ridiculous.

Finding Are Us

Different people bring out different sides of you. That isn't artificial at all. It's discovery. And you can think about the two "new" people who appear when two characters talk, and how it's a discovery for each and each other, so actually four discoveries. 1 -> 2 -> 4.

1 person -> 2 people relating -> 4 discoveries

Mind the Q / Mind Trait Q

A common way people lack empathy is failing to understand that a difference between two people can last a lifetime. Imagine you have a friend with trait Q. You may think you know what that is, but they have always had it, and you never had. For you Q goes away when you forget.

For them it never does. And because it is always there, it affects them in all kinds of ways. Imagine Q combined with every other thing that appears in life. Prima facie, any of those could interact. You forget Q exists; they get surprised by interactions between Q and life.

Now you tell them they don't make sense because you fail to remember Q, or when you remember Q, you fail to appreciate that even they are constantly surprised by interactions between Q and other things. You know enough to know you don't know, but then you say "You make no sense."

Or, worse, you distort what you hear and observe, and you leap to inferring all negative motives (prejudice in one of its many guises), giving a convincing appearance of intentional deafness. Rather than learn something or simply understand where another person is coming from, you decide that it's your job to judge what's relevant and important and understandable.

If this is your approach, don't be surprised if that person concludes that you're being stupid and insensitive.

Hurls (from Inside)

The world is a giant multi-dimensional ball hurling through possibility space.

We forget that it's got momentum, that the whole thing's a vector pointed somewhere, moving through the jungle of whatever else is out there. Maybe other worlds.

Say the universe is made of bubbles. It takes a while to see it, then you get knocked back and can't unsee it.

Bubbles that orbit bubbles that orbit bubbles. From there, you get all sorts of hairier superstructures involving filaments, linkages, walls, grates, zig-zag backgrounds, super-polymerizations into tissues and organisms.

Meetings/Brushes with the Beast

Writing is not just capturing a thought. It's also capturing the thought well—what I call "capturing the beast." A writer may develop the habit of writing certain thoughts over and over: searching for a good, true expression.

I'm not convinced it's possible to be a decent writer without this habit. While admittedly I have little in the way of scientific proof, from what I've heard and read, creative types often produce tremendous amounts more than they share as final. The repetition is preparation.

It's frustrating for a creative person to get stuck in the same loop. You want to move on to something new, better. But you know you haven't captured the beast yet.

Fair Is a Form of Smart/Sentient

Fairness is something that takes intelligence to recognize, understand, and arrange. One reason the world isn't fairer is simply stupidity.

"Might makes right" is an easy rule for animals to understand. If a lifeform is simple enough, it'll never appreciate the difference between fairness and unfairness anyway—or may experience nothing at all.

It's because we have conscious experience, and because we can become aware of fairness, that it can matter to us so much.

I say this because while I believe fairness is very important, I think if you are getting depressed about the incredible unfairness of the animal kingdom, you can at least consider that many of the animals do not process as deeply as we do and may not be keenly aware, much if any of the time, of what they are missing.

No one is totally free. Totally free means random, and we aren't. Even when you are ostensibly free—free from an outside perspective—you'll need to find your own restrictions so that you can make decisions. Whether this seems intuitive or not, we have to accept that if no possibility is ever cut off or modulated down until the moment of choosing, the choice is random. And even in perfectly unconstrained randomness, that moment of choosing itself does become a constraint. It cuts off every possibility except one. Randomness, paradoxically, though as free as possible, brings with it the restriction that the choice cannot really make sense, cannot be strategic... or at least not in the thoughtful way we understand the word "strategy."

There are scenarios in which the most rational choice would be to become as random as possible to avoid predictability. For example, when you play rock, paper, scissors, in the first approximation at least, the best you can do is to become completely random selecting among three options. This offers the opponent no chance to predict. Game theory tells us that total randomness here gives the opponent no chance to find an advantage except by luck. Yet if there is a chance to predict the opponent in turn, then pure randomness is no longer the best option. The best option is to constrain that randomness—that so-called total freedom—to complement what can be predicted about the opponent's choice.

I think we have a sort of freedom of will because first our minds are highly complex and their activity bubbles up from chaotic factors, but also second because it behooves us to be unpredictable to any opponents. That is, we do not just choose chaotically, and we are not just inherently unpredictable as weather, we choose chaotically-randomly among sensible options. The seemingly infinite spectrum of possible thought and action is whittled down by sensation and emotion - by feeling. To say we can choose without feeling (if this picture I'm painting is true enough) would be absurd, as it is by feeling - by consciousness, by the reflective innerly sculpting of informing ourselves - that we make any decision at all.

We have trouble choosing "randomly" unless there is a criterion. At simplest, that criterion would be "choose randomly!" and we would not know what to do, we would have to depend on our current feeling to constrain and suggest. So "choose randomly!" for us can only mean "do what you feel!"

If we can only, at our freest, do what we feel, we are not entirely free and never will be while we feel. By this way of seeing, death may be the ultimate freedom. What happens to our window at that moment we do not know for certain. It is relatively unconstrained by known fact. It may well be that we blink out forever, but it may also be that something even more mysterious happens. In a real "forever," patterns are likely to recur. Even a pattern as complicated as a life might recur. So we cannot be entirely certain that a sufficiently close pattern will never recur and we will never take consciousness again. Can we? 

Death is a big rolling of hidden dice. We do not understand the factors, yet, that make us conscious, so we cannot say for certain whether they might ever recur. We can say essentially for certain - to everyone's satisfaction - that consciousness itself will recur. We see it everywhere, even in animals. But we do not know whether our own window, which we find so special and meaningful, will ever have another chance - whether with similar biological details or any other set of circumstances. Most of us would like to continue feeling something after death - would like another life - provided it is not too bad a life - even if nearly everything about us were to change other than the living and the tolerability. 

Feeling is evolved strategy. (Evolved and finite, it is likely flawed.) Choosing is, perhaps, evolved randomness within that strategy. (This may begin to compensate for the flawing.)

It may still be that we tap into quantum randomness for a source of pure unpredictability and universe-branching potential. (Shouldn't that be a term? Branching potential? It's a hypothesis, at least. We have to give it that much.) Relativistic effects - unbeknownst to the developers - are necessary for the operation of car batteries. Quantum effects - unbeknownst to the developers - are necessary for the operation of fireworks. Biologists have already demonstrated that birds' sense of direction by magnetic detection depends on quantum effects. This is a proof of concept that evolution has been able, like the developers of fireworks and car batteries, to drill down and harness "rare" physics for specific uses. Evolution can channel quantum effects and no doubt relativistic effects - that is its genius, that it can use anything that can be found, and without intention.

And so why are we so certain - just because we do not see how it would work - that consciousness has no quantum or relativistic properties? Maybe it has both.

Consciousness is a pure moment. It is the essence of immediacy. If we believe relativity, then separated events in space cannot be exactly immediate - cannot be entirely and definitely simultaneous. Maybe consciousness is a complicated tangle of immediacy, and you and I do not share consciousness because our minds are already too far separated in space - and therefore time.

I think it's true. I may be an ignoramus, may be operating on hunches, but I think it's true.

It's entirely possible - maybe even overwhelmingly likely, for all I know - that consciousness has nothing to do with the special features of relativity or quantum mechanics. But it also seems possible - however minutely - that consciousness has in common with black holes a merging of both kinds of effect.

Physicists may be ashamed to suggest such notions without ways to test them. I am not a physicist and I try not to be ashamed. The child in me wants to know and doesn't see why not.

The Empty Proof—What Next?

In the end, everyone is motivated by self-interest. Even if you're sacrificing yourself, you're identifying with something as an extension of yourself.

The ability to identify with something outside the traditional bounds of self depends partly on empathy, a facility or skill that is not equally distributed in the population.

To see someone's self-interest in their actions, in other words, is not, or should not be, to invalidate that person's actions or words.

In the end, everything we do reduces to some form of self-interest. Proving it is so for someone should not be demeaning. It is always so.

What we should instead critique is how and with what effect.