…is a continual narration, whereby the narrator mistakes himself for the stories told.  This explains celebrity culture: people have invested so much of themselves in them…..

…is cold.  Empathy is cold. We have seen empathy in nervous systems.  It is neither ‘love’ nor ‘surrender.’ But empathy is the engine that drives us forward.  The more we see of it, the more we will align with it.

To what extent should our children be like us?

… is what we see. We just have to be aware of what seeing is.  Then things will work.

*… I mean that in the good sense of believing that you can have your cake and eat it too…

Aaron Sloman is a broad thinker. I often find myself in agreement with him. Bang. Bang. Bang [pdf].

David Pearce is very serious about the pink monkey farm project.

I don’t know about elephants, but it is telling that we apes can recognize ourselves in mirrors, while many others can’t. Is this a sign that one is beginning to learn to relate subjective experience to what it is that one sees?  If this is on track, then it is probably related to empathy, when one learns to relate something very similar between vision and being.  It passes for Theory of Mind in some circles, but I think that is a bit misleading.  It is self-recognition, and may be mistaken for self-awareness.

Look at yourself in a mirror.  Now try to imagine being a less social animal (for only social animals can do this), for whom that thing you see as a reflection has no significance.  The viewer does not try to make sense of that blob of light.  My immediate feeling is that this animal is not socially connected, and for the animal, he himself is not part of any picture he sees.  Compared to the non-social animal, we are a level higher.  We dinged.  We are dinging again, I think, as we recognize, out there, how we are formed.