Debbie Foster

is a delayed-choice version of the double-slit experiment in which the experimenters seem able to dictate what happens it the past by erasing (versus not erasing) quantum information in the present.

There is no way, strictly, to ask Quine's question in Nahuatl. The language lacks a term for "is." The language similarly lacks what we English speakers call "words."

As mentioned in the previous chapter, instead of words, the Aztecs had nuclear clauses—meaning that each basic component of a sentence could be its own sentence. As a result of this

If you’re skeptical of any prescriptive advice to begin with, if “less certainty, more inquiry” is your guiding light, not only will you listen; you will adjust. You will grow. And if that’s not self-awareness and self-discipline, I don’t know what is.

We must reclaim as much of ourselves as we can. We must discover a personal morality shaped by experience rather than 'tribal' prohibitions. We must wrestle our minds free of prehistory so that we can make better, rational choices.

These three points, that we are all bound to slip up, that even our cosmic existence is ephemeral, and that happiness, or at least pleasure, comes and goes just like any feeling, form the scaffolding for Aztec philosophy. Any philosophical outlook that ignores these points, the Aztecs would say, is naive.

As you write, something invisible flows out of the surface of your skin and language begins to move like a living creature. Your body temperature may become slightly elevated, and you may enter into a slightly euphoric state as you abandon your ego altogether.

Time travel needs a self, and the self needs to travel in time. This formation of a story of the self, and a sense of that story developing through time, through incidents, encounters and events, in continuity, that’s the human trick, the one the other animals can’t do.

They had discussed the sacredness of stares before. They're the brain's sensory deprivation tank, she'd said; an enclosed, restorative, floating paralysis that should be as uninterruptible and respected as prayer. When Adjoua stared at something long enough for it to start moving—the brick wall, the swirl of grain in the wooden floors, the uneven

Two tracks opened in my mind. One track held the world I knew to be real—the solid ground below me, the air in my lungs, the sun that rose in the morning. And on the other track, moving in the opposite direction, was a new reality, one I had never considered. On this track inexplicable things appeared, impossible things, ones that terrified me.