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The Word, the Aleph—these are Borges’s names for that minimal abstraction from absorption in the world, that synthesis of one moment in space-time to another that permits such moments to be moments at all. This Word is language, yes, but it is also something deeper than that.

Creating models of reality is an essential part of high-level thinking. In order to survive and operate effectively in the world, we must be able to simplify and experiment with outcomes as we plan or make decisions. In so doing, we create and evolve worlds of ideas that exist apart from and in conversation with the embodied world. This process is

We have always wanted to see, feel, and understand more than we do, and in pursuit of these goals we have consistently tried to transcend the limits imposed on us by biology and geology, and extend ourselves into potential worlds mediated only by our minds.

perhaps our vision of an ultimately knowable human path through space and time isn’t merely problematic because it is incomplete. Perhaps it is per se impossible.

we are creeping towards the slightly discomforting idea that what we call our mind or consciousness is constructed by an integrated set of brain structures that models selves and worlds, provides more or less clarity and insight, and can induce both lucid dreams and OBEs.

North American Space Harbor. Elite passengers traveled

The trouble comes when we take our common and perfectly acceptable image of reality as an independent space-time in which things are happening in blissful disregard of our knowledge and start applying it where it doesn’t belong: below the limits of observability or beyond the very borders of existence itself; between the links of the mechanistic ca

the assumption of mechanistic causality is utterly at peace with the existential blindness that allows for responsibility, for freedom.

They are acts of the intellect, or of the imagination, or of the will, that are characterized by their goal: by means of them, the individual tries to transform her way of seeing the world, in order to transform herself. The point is not to inform, but to form oneself.