This is a quote from The Brain That Changes Itself (a fascinating book that Kris gave me a while back) that has stuck with me for a while after reading it. That it comes from a chapter focused on pain and phantom limbs is almost irrelevant, as the broader implications extend to all the senses and our sense of identity as well.

[In order to feel pain] we need only a body image, produced by our brain maps. People with actual limbs don't usually realize this, because the body images of our limbs are perfectly projected onto our actual limbs, making it impossible to distinguish our body image from our body. "Your own body is a phantom," says [pain researcher] Ramachandran, "one that your brain has constructed purely for convenience."

We are, each one of us, responsible for every war because of the aggressiveness of our own lives, because of our nationalism, our selfishness, our gods, our prejudices, our ideals, all of which divide us.

When I was a teenager I found a small MS-DOS text adventure game called Tess - or - Beyond the Tesseract. It gripped my imagination savagely. Playing the game looked like this:

You are beyond the edge of forever.
(sleeping) Enter command: inventory
You are carrying: a theorem. an axiom. a postulate. a hypothesis. (sleeping) Enter command: examine postulate.
It's a basic fact. (sleeping) Enter command: think
You thought of an idea (sleeping) Enter command: examine idea

A World Enslaved at foreignpolicy.com.

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. Before you go, let’s be clear on what you are buying. A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Agreed? Good.

The Atlantic Online has published a fascinating article about a Chinese Bankers perspectives on the United States.

The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness

Hm. Something else to read. Will follow up when I do. But my hook is this:

a belief in the innate superiority of humans over other animals is part of the Western tradition. Christians tell us that only humans have souls, and though they speak in a different language secular thinkers mostly believe much the same.

I've been needing to found hackrag for sometime, but things kept getting in the way. Hackrag is just a place to organize thoughts. So I'll keep it brief.

In the words of the late, great Marcel Marceau: '...'