TNBT: imagine artificial meat made with nanobots that mimic the texture and taste of food, woven into the fibers of real food. And you can select exactly how many calories you want your meal to contain while having your meal experience stay exactly the same. And the nanobots would be recyclable, cutting the energy requirements to produce "real" food. Yes the idea of recycling what you put in your mouth sounds disgusting, but don't worry by the time we invent this, our values would have moved on.

Realizing that your ears are picking up conversations in a language you understand in a crowd is almost as eerie as quantum entanglement.

Time (aka how we die)

Time (aka how we die)

1. Our experience of time is not proportional to its duration. 2. It is proportional to the number of events our brains flag as significant. 3. An event is by definition a change. 4. Our brains are excellent at noticing patterns, and gets better with age. 5. A change that can be generalized as a pattern stops being significant. 6. Such changes are what we call routine. 7. Adults stop experiencing time because they tend to fall into routine. 8. Adults fall into routine because they have negotiated with powers in society for a lower risk environment in exchange for being submissive to these powers in specific, predictable ways.

9. To experience time again, adults can work around the brain's mechanisms: consciously seek out activities that are new in new ways; construct schedules specifically to break routine, even if they comprise the same activities in different orders; or, find a way to make ends meet in roles that require one to specialize in doing things that nobody has done before.

10. Just because one is "sacrificing" for a "good" cause is not sufficient reason for choosing routine - routine is a choice, often made as one's willpower is gradually eroded by the stress of not acting directly on a perception that one's survival is at risk. 11. But routine can also be a strategic decision, such as to make space for new activities that the brain will find overwhelmingly eventful. 12. Deciding to give certain activities up to routine is therefore sometimes a very brave decision.

13. The brain is optimized for survival. 14. Eventually one has to come to terms with one's total experience of time and how it was or wasn't relevant to one's paradigm of survival. 15. just because it feels like time has stopped doesn't change the fact that the maximum amount of time one can experience is continuously decreasing. 16. But time is not the only dimension we move in. 17. Yet because we cannot steal time, and we cannot make time, it is a unique experience: it is completely free, yet altogether precious.

TNBT - APE

TNBT Imagine religion evolved into something called "Applied Psychology Experience" (APE) where you willingly get psyched into believing in a framework of memes carefully constructed to appeal to the way your brain ticks. And in this framework you will find it easy to make yourself do things you thought were not possible. Even something like spending unimaginable amounts of time to ace an exam or master a skill, or to take up an impossible or dangerous assignment of a lifetime - by allowing APE to draw on your innate survival instincts that worked on you when you were a kid.

The difference between professionals and non-professionals isn't the money or the skill. It's being able to consistently satisfy your clients, no matter who they are or how you feel. The next time you think about sex workers, think about how you measure up to that!

The story of human survival has 3
chapters:

satisfaction and sustainability aka now and forever aka doing and being,

power and submission aka freedom and stability aka addiction and sanity,

sensuousness and rationalizing aka anecdote and statistics aka order and chaos.

Love, bravery, kindness and all that? Just different ways these primal forces play on our perception!

A people without a story

A people without a story
Is a people without dreams
But a people without a past
Is a people without the bondage
Of those in power.

Isn't the terrorist vs civilization dichotomy is simply the good vs evil dichotomy retargeted and repackaged?