Tex and the City #2: What Comes After Regret

     Tex and the City is a column written by Amanda Foust chronicling her experiences with Austin rave culture, concert life, and college fraternity experiences at the University of Texas at Austin. These are writings to preserve the present moment in ether and not have it run away from my memory. These are writings that keep my recollection alive, and not let it slowly decay. I’m so scared of rotting and getting old; but, writings stay young forever. 

I have found that anticipation is a fierce beast to slay. I would waiver for years on how to handle it. Years ago, I used to hate being incredibly excited for something, because always and without fail, the event would not live up to my expectations. I found that, as a child, setting my clothes out the night before a compelling day was better than the actual day itself.

For years, I had lived for anticipation. I was convinced happiness was not real, and was merely a facade of what people expected life to be like. It was a shell of what anticipation was trying to make itself to be. I imagiend happiness was what occurred when anticipation turned out to fulfill its prophecy. Instead of feeling elated after a particularly interesting day, I instead felt dull with despair – thinking about all the chances I could’ve taken, all the opportunities I missed to fulfill the day of my dreams like I wanted, all the miscalculated steps, all the bare ugly silences I could have filled with beauty.

I felt like the painter of my own life, but I used black, white and grey only. The only time I saw color was during the process of anticipation. During waiting, I cannot be disappointed, but only ecstatic at all the possibilities of what could happen that day. During waiting, I am safe from regret; I build a shelter in my mind to protect myself from the external world and how unpredictable it was. Everything I wanted could come true, whether I was dreaming, daydreaming, or simply thinking. My mind was a sanctuary.

Slowly, my mind turned into something I didn’t want to interact with. It became something I was terrified of – more than the real world, more than the unpredictability of all. My mind turned into something that controlled me, not something that I controlled. I had started to be puppeteered by the unexpectedness of life. I found I wanted to control fate much more than I was able to. It felt like the apocalypse, but nothing had changed, which is actually more terrifying. I just realized how vulnerable we truly are at all times to determinism. My optimism for life was slowly killing me, when everyone had made it seem like that was the answer.

I had become depressed at my life being full of continuous disappointments. Real life felt like something that would never be better than my mind. Expectations were picking me apart slowly, flaying me bit by bit, cutting the meat off of me gradually like a stick of gyro meat. I would get smaller and smaller, trying to hide in the crooks of life, trying to not be caught. If I was caught, I’d have to live in the real world. I’d have to confront the fact that life is not built in the way I want it to be.

Just like a child who hasn’t learned their lesson, I was incredibly excited for the Pearl Street Co-Op party, as most of my friends were going. JD was going, Hannah was coming back in town, I was seeing Paola after a good amount of time, and my frat brothers, Jake, Devansh, Alan, Angus and Yanni were coming along too. I was supposed to shoot Smothered, Grocery Bag and Handmade Bangs. I had made my bed the night before just so I could lie in it properly when it was time to go. In other words, I created the biggest expectation I could fathom. And I would not accept this night going any less memorable than any other party. I knew I wanted to write about this party for Tex and the City. I wanted it to mean something.

Devansh and I started pregaming at 5pm, which of course, was not one of our best ideas, as the party only started at 8pm and went until 2am. If I had actually thought ahead and didn’t let my expectations think for me, I would’ve noticed that that would’ve been a bad idea. 

I dressed normally, then I saw all my friends dress to theme, so I went back home and changed. I wore a tie, a black tank top, a plaid skirt, a beaded belt, and some classic eye gems. I felt great and very indie sleazy, given the theme was Jersey Shore vs. Indie Sleaze. But, something I’ve noticed, when you plan your outfit this hard, it usually gets rendered useless. I find that the hours spent ruminating the possible options in your head magically float away and lose meaning once the outfit is chosen. It feels like time wasted.

We got to the party, I met all of my friends that were there, but something inside me made it not feel like enough. All the stimuli, all the distractions, they couldn’t fulfill the hole inside of my stomach. 

Soon enough, the words I spoke started to press and shove down on me, like a bully. Just like life had not become enough for me, neither had words. Any communication I had with someone felt disingenuous and not real. I had to get out. Most of my friends had already left due to the environment in the air being wrong, just as I was feeling, but Hannah and Paola were still there.

I decided to go back to my apartment to go get some food. I assumed I was just hungry and that’s why I wasn’t acting like myself. But you must realize, that this is who you truly are, when you wrestle with your words like an adversary. This is when your barriers come down. This is when words feel like pulling a Twizzler out of a package, them sticking to each other and eventually one being ripped. This is when life laughs in your face, tells you you’re not as capable as you thought you were. Language becomes the hardest conceivable thing. 

You realize you are powerless to the anticipation. 

My roommates were throwing a huge party in my apartment, but I ignored it all and had some drunk guys help me make mac and cheese. I headed over to the party and brought it with me, and Paola, Hannah and I enjoyed some food during the concert. That was probably the best part of the whole night.

It’s strange, isn’t it? I was excited for the other friends who were coming, and for the bands, but I was mostly happy about mac and cheese, something I spontaneously decided to do. I argue about free will and determinism, and how anticipation makes me feel empty, but was I not free to change my night? Was I not free enough?

The thing I was excited for ended up being my disappointment, and the thing I hadn’t even considered at the beginning became my excitement. I guess what I learned is that you can’t write something in your head before you experience it. I had written my ending before I had even started my beginning. I wanted my experience to go a certain way, and when it didn’t, I felt personally attacked. 

I used to be very stoic, and I would “negatively visualize” all the time, meaning I would imagine the worst case scenario of a situation, be okay with it, and then move on. This alleviates disappointment. But what it also alleviates is excitement. Because you are so detached to the outcome of anything, you cannot become attached to anything either. 

I realized I wouldn’t want it any other way. I would rather there be bits of color rather than no color at all. But, I wouldn’t inflate life to be some beautiful thing, because it’s not. It never gives you what you want. Life is not either full of color or devoid of it. Sometimes the clouds hide the sun and it becomes shady, then a minute from then, the sun is uncovered and the ground is lightened again. 

Tex and the City is not something to inflate my current life. It is not an embellishment or an ornament. It is not something to make me look good or cool. It is supposed to show the underbellies and sideboobs of society. It is supposed to show the nights when everything works out right – and the nights when you seem to not be in the mood and it’s just not the night. Sometimes you step out of the dirt and you walk, other times, life buries you deeper. Sometimes you win, sometimes life wins. 

The human condition is not about being perfect all the time. In fact, it is about those nights that don’t seem to feel quite right. You can’t put your finger on why. And, sometimes, there lacks a reason why at all. The human condition is about feeling wrong at times. The human condition is about feeling broken, and it’s also about the moments when light seeps into the cracks. It’s about the moments when a hug feels like a glue gun. It’s about the moments when a phrase you say in public feels like a dart that hits the wall instead of the target. It’s about the moments when you have everything going on in your mind and yet, nothing to say. It’s about the moments when you want time to desperately stop, but it doesn’t; it just goes on and on and on, like a filibuster without an interruption. 

The human condition is not revolutionary or beautiful or something to gawk at. It’s barely something to read about. I wonder why all my friends love escapist literature and cinematography so much; it’s because focusing on the human condition all the time is too draining. You must focus on other worlds and nonhumans to make up for the things we experience on this planet. Without our distractions from reality, we couldn’t live in reality.

I don’t want to write something gorgeous. I want to speak the words everyone is too afraid to say. Tex and the City is not going to be about making people jealous or showing off all the things I go to – it is a place for me to be honest about living in Austin. And sometimes, the parties are not as good as they look on social media. I didn’t want to write this week, because I didn’t want to lie and say I had a fantastic time, but I think more people would benefit from my honesty. I, in all sincerity, just want people to feel less crazy.

You are not crazy for wanting to leave a party early. All that it means is that you are human, and that is a horrible and a fantastic thing, all at once. It’s simultaneously something to cry over and something to stare in awe at. 

A party is an opportunity. If you don’t take it, it doesn’t mean it’s a missed opportunity. It means it wasn’t an experience that was meant for your life. Sometimes, and only sometimes, moments are not meant for us and they are not ours to steal. They must be given to us and in turn, we must accept them.

Tex and the City #1 - the Present is a Gift given by the Reaper

Tex and the City is a column written by Amanda Foust chronicling her experiences with Austin rave culture, concert life, and college fraternity experiences at the University of Texas at Austin. These are writings to preserve the present moment in ether and not have it run away from my memory. These are writings that keep my recollection alive, and not let it slowly decay. I’m so scared of decaying and getting old; but, writings stay young forever.

We piled into the Uber, realizing too late that we had pregamed too early. This became very apparent when Devansh made inhuman noises the whole twenty minute drive, while Jake and I just stared at each other, afraid of what would happen at the actual venue. Even though we said nothing, our eye contact made us know tonight would be something worth writing about.

    Concourse was supposed to be more packed than ever, so we arrived relatively early in order to beat the line. Tchami wasn’t coming on until 12:30 or so, yet we still got there around 10. In the meantime, we had to listen to the two openers before the main event. It was strange; my fear of not seeing Tchami had led me to not see Tchami.

    The most important part of the event, though, was the fact that it was Carol Anne’s last rave until she and her boyfriend, Steve, left for the Czech Republic for their study abroad program. As someone who had lived with her for two straight years, her departure felt monumental in a sense. It’s like I was staring at her the whole time, because I wanted to preserve who she was right then. I knew when she came back she would be different and changed, and I wanted the present moment to be forever. I wanted to stay in that rave pit for as long as I could, just to keep the moment going. I wasn’t prepared to grieve the experience after it was over.

    The present moment is so interesting, because it’s truly the only thing we ever experience, but why do I feel like I take it for granted so much? There are times I’m at a party, when afterwards I must do homework, and I think the whole time “You know, I’m going to really miss this when I leave. I want to appreciate it as much as I can,” but I never end up appreciating it enough. I always find myself missing that moment no matter how much I remind myself to breathe and be present. It feels like a disease, like we are cursed to be creatures plagued with remembering, but never experiencing.

    The whole time I was thinking about how much I was going to miss it. And, I was completely right. Concourse feels like a drug within itself – you indulge, yet you still want more after it’s done. It’s never enough. 

    Raves and concerts are my escape from my responsibilities. It is my allotted time for the week that is not dependent on thoughts or intellect, but instead pure emotion and feeling. I’ve found the best way to appreciate these moments for what they are is to not think about them as they happen. Instead, let them happen to you. 

    During the openers, I would turn my head to either Jake or Jess or Carol Anne or Devansh, and all I saw on their faces was pure bliss. I could tell none of them had thoughts in their head like I did; it was like a plate that had been rinsed clean. It solidified for me that the only thing better than experiencing the present moment yourself is watching others lose themselves in the moment. As a photographer, I get so annoyed when people pose for my candid shots, but as a raver, that’s never a problem. Nobody is worried about anyone else. It is the epitome of dancing like nobody’s watching.

    So silly of them, though. I am a writer after all. I am always watching.

    This rave taught me something very profound, but also very obvious, and that was that I had found my group of people that I had been searching for all my life. They include me in everything, they love my presence and we all enjoy the same functions. I don’t feel like an addition, like a bond added onto another bond, but instead, one of the foundational covalent bonds making up one conglomeration. I was part of the whole. As we danced together, I felt us become more connected. 

    There’s some kind of relief that floods your body when you realize you have found people that will stay with you for the rest of your life. You know that if others leave you, these ones will stay. These people have seen me at my lowest moments, but they don’t think of me as my worst moments like I do. They simply see them as part of a whole, a whole that is so much bigger than all of my worst times. You need depth to have dimension; I would rather be a three-dimensional figure with worries, qualms and problems, than a flat surface void of any issues. I would rather bleed than be without blood flowing in me. 

    When Tchami came on, it was fantastic, but my substances had faded away. I was tired, yawning and exhausted, but more than anything, I was sad. I knew my experience was about to end, and not in the way I wanted. I wanted to say goodbye to Carol Anne, but I left in the crowd and never got a chance. I know she’s going to come back, but she won’t come back as the same person I saw at the rave warehouse.

              There are some moments you can never relive, except when you write about them. While I was writing that, it felt like I experienced it a second time, and that is such a gift.  I spit in the face of linear time and fate. I stop being another cog in the machine; I am still part of the machine, but now, I am cognizant.

   

More People Should Love Their Brains

 Neuroscience and knowledge about it have become more necessary than ever. With the rise of AI technology and the conversation beginning about what it means to be human, we as a society are slowly figuring out that maybe this is not as clear-cut as we once thought. 

Neuralink, Elon Musk's new company, is trying to combine consciousness and technology. What they essentially want to do is put a chip in your brain, you think, and you complete the task that you thought about, without doing any effort or work. It sounds a bit like telepathy and definitely something that is way beyond our reach scientifically right now. If anything, if you think too much about it, it starts to feel scary. Its aim is to take away the purpose of the brain and completely computerize it. It wants to take away the special experience that is doing a task yourself. It wants to take our lives away from us and give them to robots to live for us. 

I propose something that is scarier. A lot of people find it frightening what could happen if we have complete control over our minds and put them into robots. I think the reality of it all is more terrifying – the fact that we have zero control over our brains and we know nothing about them.

When people discuss mysterious topics we know little about, people tend to talk about the ocean or space before they bring up the brain. That is because the brain inherently feels like we know a lot about it, because we all have one. But, we cannot explore the deepest pits of the ocean and we cannot see the furthest reaches of the universe. At least we can cut a brain open and look at it. We can hold it in our hands; that feels like utter control. So, many people tend to skip over how misunderstood the brain is, or perhaps lack of understanding.

As a junior Neuroscience major and Philosophy minor, I’ve seen an interesting discrepancy. My neuroscience classes teach purely about functionalism, about how each part of the brain has a specific function, and how everything in the brain can be explained physically. Then, I would head to my philosophy of mind class and find all of that be turned on its axis. The whole purpose of the philosophy of mind is to explore the brain and how much we truly don’t know about it. It rises questions my neuroscience professors would scoff at – but they are just as necessary as the science we are sure of. We should also be taught what we are unsure about. 

The biggest topic in my philosophy of mind class was only discussed in my neuroscience class once – I even thanked my professor for including it, because most professors don’t even do that much. It’s much easier on one’s mentality to not talk about it and simply ignore it. Yet, that big topic is the center of everything we don’t know about the brain.

Philosophy of mind proposes a “hard problem of consciousness” that has been unsolved to this day. What it entails is that physical properties have yet to explain how subjective experience is formed. What subjective experience means is the fact that humans can watch the same event, yet walk away from it with completely different thoughts. It’s the fact that each of us has somewhat identical brains, yet our thought processes are so vastly different. It’s the fact that we cannot replicate what it is to “be like” someone else. We only know how to be ourselves. 

And that is where Neuralink fails. It instead skips over the hard problem of consciousness because it’s too hard to answer, and still attempts to control consciousness with engineering. But, I argue that we cannot control the brain until we know all of its inner faculties.

Another thing my neuroscience classes have taught me is that parts of the field are based solely on a guesstimate that seems right. For example, did you know that decreased levels of serotonin are correlated with a depressive mood, but are not the cause? Read that again. 

But almost all research in mental disorders has been based around the fact that neurotransmitter deficiencies or abundances are the cause of all kinds of mental disorders – increase in dopamine for schizophrenia, increase in dopamine and norepinephrine for bipolar disorder, and decrease in serotonin for depression. 

How they found out that anticonvulsants work well with bipolar patients was entirely by accident. They prescribed anticonvulsants to people with epilepsy and noticed a more stable mood. That correlation is why so many bipolar patients are on mood stabilizers to this day. Is that really a good enough reason to prescribe millions of people this medication?

One excellent example is looking at the side effects of antidepressant medication. While it can cause a more stable mood for whatever reason, it also can cause low libido, lack of sleep, and suicidal ideation, which is the whole reason why they were on the medication in the first place. The wide range of side effects for mood stabilizers, antidepressants, and antipsychotics are not normal for other medications. While other medications may make you drowsier or have more brain fog, these medications affect your functioning as a person or who you are fundamentally. It is a very extreme measure to increase or decrease neurotransmitters in the brain, yet we are doing it willy-nilly and overprescribing them. This would feel a lot better if it weren't all based on a correlation; yet, since it is, it feels somewhat unsafe. Most people don’t consider that the medication is wrong in the first place. We want to trust scientists have our best interest at heart.

What I’ve found in the center of all of this is what it always seems to be – the desire for money. What would happen if scientists stated that there is simply a correlation between neurotransmitter amounts and mental illness? Would psychiatrists be out of a job? What would happen to Big Pharma? Or, where would all their money go?

And that’s the problem. The truth is being stepped on and replaced with money. 

I’m not stating that there aren’t scientists out there making real progress, but a majority of the progress we have made seems to be like we have been digging deeper and deeper into the wrong patch of grass. We look like we are accomplishing something, yet we aren’t in the right place so we will never hit the gold. It’s the act of running on a treadmill – we are getting tired and feel like we are working, but we are advancing no distance. 

It seems unlikely that scientists would do such a thing, but let me paint you a picture. Imagine your job is trying to make sense of the most complicated thing on the planet. Religion was created simply to make sense of consciousness – we had to create “souls” and an “afterlife” to make sense of subjective experience. All of human history has been spent ignoring consciousness. What is the harm if you ignore it too? You want to tell society you are making progress, and you’re not so inevitably stuck. It’s what you want to believe, and since you are the one who controls the media and research society receives, you realize you have more power than you thought. Science is our backbone, but what happens if our backbone is faulty? What happens when the foundation of a house is cracking and none of the construction workers are trying to fix it?

What I mean when I say ‘consciousness’ is referring to the unique feature that humans have that animals or other alive creatures don’t. It’s hard to put into words, but essentially it’s what all poems and writings have ever truly been about – trying to make sense of our unique human consciousness and learning how to live with it. Sometimes this advanced consciousness can feel like a blessing and a curse – it causes us to overthink, suppress, and displace. Dogs have no idea what coping or defense mechanisms are, and they don’t have to worry about that like we do. In a sense, we are burdened. We are trying to run away from it as much as we can, but we can’t because it’s inside all of us. It’s what you are using to read this right now. We cannot escape the brain. Subjectivity and its effects seep into everything we do whether we like it or not. The reason you don’t get along with your mother is that she sees the world totally subjectively different from you, and that is why you can never see eye to eye. It seems so easy to make sense of human nature once you realize the core of it is just subjectivity and its impacts, but what makes it difficult is how much it is being suppressed by science. The reason why is that it cannot be explained in scientific terms. Neuroscience’s foundation is based on functionalism, the idea that physical states in the brain give rise to all experiences that humans encounter and that any behavior or thought can be explained physically or physiologically. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with that idea – if anything, to scientists, this makes the most sense, and when applying common sense, it makes the most sense too. Any other explanation feels false or supernatural. But, there are several other theories about what could cause subjective experience. Descartes believed the mind and body were completely separate, and the soul was not connected to the body at all. Funny enough, panpsychism used to be the leading belief in the philosophy of mind, which is essentially the idea that consciousness is an overwhelming entity in the universe. What is more common now is the principle of logical positivism, which states that observation or logical proof is the only way to verify a philosophical argument. You cannot observe consciousness or logically prove it, so thus, it fell out of the conversation. Now, neuroscientists avoid it like the plague, like they are scared of it. It seems like they are scared of uncovering that rock and finding something indescribable underneath it. We are scared of what we don’t know, so we create fallacies and lies to protect ourselves.

Religion was created due to humanity’s fear of dying. For the sake of self-preservation, we have created a mass delusion that we all willingly live in and endorse. If anything, speaking out against religion is seen as an attack on a community, when all it is is a call to action for more research in consciousness. Instead of studying something that makes no sense, we instead created fables and stories that make some sort of sense to us. It couldn’t be that this mind and human experience is actually very unique and concerning; instead, it was created by a God. This alleviates us of solving this problem. We ignore the hard problem of consciousness in science as long as we can. We are scared we might find something scarier than religion. We are scared we are not in as much control of our minds as we thought. We are scared there is no afterlife or a higher power watching over us to make sure we are okay. We are scared this is all we are. No, there has to be more! There has to be!

My philosophy of mind class is entirely dedicated to figuring out consciousness by teaching us all the multitudes of theories – panpsychism, functionalism, Cartesian dualism, physicalism, materialism – but it never gives us an answer. But, adversely, the problem with my neuroscience class is that they are too sure about their answer. Sure, we know about action potentials and neurons rather well, but we know nothing about how they construe together to bring about this consciousness. This is conveniently skipped over. We are taught about the brain like we already know everything; in a field that necessitates creativity, they stomp it out of us due to fear of what we might unleash.

Something my philosophy of mind TA keeps on repeating whenever someone asks him why this class is important is that ‘How have we become this complex and why us? Does the brain simply grow more and more complex to the point that consciousness arises? What is the breaking point? What is it that distinguishes us from animals or primates? There are so many nonphysical theories about consciousness for a reason because none of this makes any sense and it’s a problem that personally concerns you, me, and everyone in this room.’ 

I think that the brain is something that we are not meant to figure out, but I find it foolish that we are trying to pretend like we understand it. Why can’t we just admit that we don’t know that much? Why can’t we be more honest about the fact we haven’t made any profound consciousness discoveries in decades? What are we so afraid of?

See, the thing is the universe and the ocean are physical things that are dimensionally out of our reach. We cannot deny that or try to make excuses for it. Everyone can see that nobody has touched the bottom of the ocean and that nobody has even gotten close to outside our galaxy. But instead, those scientists are marveled at trying to figure it out. Why can’t it be that same with neuroscience? Why are we pretending it’s as sturdy and understood of a science as anatomy when it’s really as clumsy and mysterious as space? 

There could be many reasons, but I think it is embarrassment. All of us live with our brains inside of us, yet nobody has been able to answer the hard problem. In a sense, we are all equally clueless. I think all of us to some degree have felt our consciousness become nonphysical, whether that be a near-death experience, meditation, or by the use of drugs. We know all of this, but nobody cares enough to speak up about it. 

I find it frustrating that so many people ask in my philosophy of mind class why this is important because it feels so obvious to me. This, this thing between your ears, is the greatest mystery to ever come onto this planet. Many people feel comforted by the fact that there are other alien creatures out there with more complex brains than us, but I instead feel comforted by the fact that we are the only ones. It makes our brains feel that much more special. Is that, not, my own kind of religion? A belief that’s not substantiated in anything, but is instead to bring me peace of mind about consciousness? That is because, to me, this whole consciousness deal would make a lot more sense if we were the final row on the food pyramid. It would give our consciousness meaning, instead of being a tool of suffering.

Another way to look at it is to compare a brain scan to a picture from the James Webb telescope, and then ask which one we know less about. I can see each individual galaxy, yet cannot see individual neurons. It’s a jumbled mess that can only measure either blood flow, oxygen levels, or radioactivity. When looking at it from one perspective, that’s a lot of advancement, but looking at it from another perspective, it’s rather pitiful. Yet, we celebrate this mediocrity and revel in it. We are okay with being ordinary because that protects us from truly finding something extraordinary, something that makes no logical sense, something that can’t be explained with brain matter or the scientific method.

We have a galaxy inside of all of us, yet nobody seems as excited about it as me. Space and the ocean are unreachable, but the brain is reachable. Why have we still not figured anything out? What excuse do we have?

Questions about whether we are living in a simulation are everywhere and they are enticing. Why? Because we want to be anywhere but where we are. We want there to be something more than just Earth. That’s the reason why we spend so much money on traveling to Mars and advancing by building self-driving cars and using all our resources and brain power to create delivery robots. We want to be the strongest thing in the world – it would be depressing for them to admit that their brain is more powerful than they are. How is that possible? Well, it’s just one organ, but it has every human questioning it with really no answers going anywhere. We don’t like the idea that we are the most advanced creatures there are – that’s why we love the idea of aliens and perhaps being in a Matrix. Because then that takes away our responsibility of understanding the brain. It’s all fiction – like how we use movies or books to escape our own lives, we are using robots to escape our brains.

Personally, I believe the brain will never be figured out, and that is why companies like Neuralink bother me so much. It is because there is so much left unanswered still, yet people are trying to jump to controlling consciousness when we haven’t even come close to solving the hard problem. We are in no position to advance neuroscience in that way – we have to figure out the bare minimum first. We caught up with our technology and AI so fast that we forgot about our brains. 

What you will realize is all of these neuroscience AI companies will fail, and people will write it off, then more companies will try the same thing, over and over. We will be stuck in a perpetual loop, simply because we are ignoring consciousness. It is the same treadmill analogy again and again. None of this is a secret to anyone of us – it’s a matter of whether we let ourselves think about it or not.

I hope one day I meet other people who love the brain as much as I do, and don’t see it as something to solve or overcome, but to bond with. I don’t think the brain is written in a language we understand. This doesn’t mean I think consciousness is entirely nonphysical, but I don’t think the scientific method will get us anywhere. I think we need to think entirely differently. We need to completely remodel the way we see the brain, similarly to how people have remodeled their minds to understand quantum physics in the universe. There is something quantum inside all of us, and it wants to be understood. It doesn’t want to hurt you and cause you pain; consciousness is the most beautiful gift we as humans have. Forget all the technology and infrastructure and civilization we built – our brain is the thing we should be the proudest of.