Debbie Foster

the “past” and the “future” are iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of spacetimemattering

Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.

we genuinely think across the fourth dimension

Innocence is an illusion. We come into this world a bundle of disordered drives and desires, some good, some not. We are neither pure nor impure, we are only somewhat educable. There is an art to transforming raw youths into decent mature adults, and its tools are experience and knowledge. Some of it is pleasant, some less so. And for every gain in

it always involves a metaphysics of transcendence.

I want to reemphasize the miraculous existence of any form of consciousness by paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein: Not how consciousness is, is mystical, but that it is.

That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation.

To think impossibly is, first and foremost, to think-with individuals and their experiences, however fantastic these experiences become or, better, precisely because they become so fantastic.

Meditative practice reveals that we are most fundamentally the opening of consciousness that watches thoughts coming and going, rather than the center of thought and intention with which we normally identify.

But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.