The More Familiar The World

When We're In A Human Body, We Don't Care About Universal Collapse - Instead, We Care Only About A Meeting Of The Eyes, A Glimpse Of Bare Flesh, The Caressing Tones Of A Loved Voice, Joy, Love, Light, The Orientation Of A House Plant, The Shade Of A Paint Stroke, The Arrangement Of Hair.

When A Male Vole Repeatedly Mates With A Female, A Hormone Called Vasopressin Is Released In His Brain. The Vasopressin Binds To Receptors In A Part Of The Brain Called The Nucleus Accumbens, And The Binding Mediates A Pleasurable Feeling That Becomes Associated With That Female. This Locks In The Monogamy, Which Is Known As Pair-bonding. If You Block This Hormone, The Pair-bonding Goes Away.

We're Trapped On This Very Thin Slice Of Perception ... But Even At That Slice Of Reality That We Call Home, We're Not Seeing Most Of What's Going On.

We Are Nothing But The Product Of Billions Of Years Of Molecules Coming Together And Ratcheting Up Through Natural Selection, We Are Composed Only Of Highways Of Fluids And Chemicals Sliding Along Roadways Within Billions Of Dancing Cells, Trillions Of Synaptic Conversations Hum In Parallel, This Vast Egglike Fabric Of Micron-thin Circuitry Runs Algorithms Undreamt Of In Modern Science, And These Neural Programs Give Rise To Our Decision Making, Loves, Desires, Fears, And Aspirations. That Understanding Would Be A Numinous Experience, Better Than Anything Ever Proposed In Anyone's Holy Text.

If Our Brains Were Simple Enough To Be Understood, We Wouldn't Be Smart Enough To Understand Them.