I Would Like To Understand Things Better,

Enormous Numbers Of People Are Taken In, Or At Least Beguiled And Fascinated, By What Seems To Me To Be Unbelievable Hocum, And Relatively Few Are Concerned With Or Thrilled By The Astounding-yet True-facts Of Science, As Put Forth In The Pages Of, Say, Scientific American.

We All Have Heard It Claimed That 13 Is An 'unlucky Number.' Indeed, There Are Many Hotels In America That For This Very Reason Claim Not To Have A 13th Floor, In The Sense That There Is No Button Bearing The Label '13' In Their Elevators (i Recently Stayed In One In New York, In Fact).

Irrationality Is The Square Root Of All Evil.

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.