A Quote by Randall Munroe

Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit. — © Randall Munroe
Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.
I can state with complete assurance that for each of us our brains form the material basis of our experiences and memories, our imaginations, our dreams.
Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.
Like our physical bodies, our memory becomes out of shape. As children, we are constantly learning new experiences, but by the time we reach our 20s, we start to lead a more sedentary life both mentally and physically. Our lives become routine, and we stop challenging our brains, and our memory starts to suffer.
Just as our brains fill in the details of an image our eyes record only roughly, so, too, do our brains employ tricks we are unaware of to fill in details about people we don't know intimately.
We used our brains to create and program them, and now we have to continue to use our brains to prevent computers from taking over our lives.
Many quantum physics are realizing or hypothesizing that consciousness is not a byproduct of evolution as has been suggested. Or for that matter, an expression of our brains, although it expresses itself through our brains. But consciousness is the common ground of existence that ultimately differentiates into space, time, energy, information and matter. And the same consciousness is responsible for our thoughts, for our emotions and feelings, for our behaviors, for our personal relationships, for our social interactions, for the environments that we find ourselves in, and for our biology.
Given the scale of the ecological crisis we are facing this is the appropriate scale of expansion. Occupying the streets to bring about change as our ancestors have done before us. Only this kind of large-scale economic disruption can rapidly bring the government to the table to discuss our demands. We are prepared to risk it all for our futures.
Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences.
Sometimes our childhood experiences are emotionally intense, which can create strong mental models. These experiences and our assumptions about them are then reinforced in our memory and can continue to drive our behavior as adults.
Might we... be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness - of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. - fit into such a computational picture?
Throughout our history, Microsoft has won by making big, bold bets. I believe that now is not the time to scale back the scope of our ambition or the scale of our investment. While our opportunities are greater than ever, we also face new competitors, faster-moving markets and new customer demands.
Learning to endure times of disappointment, suffering, and sorrow is part of our on-the-job training. These experiences, while often difficult to bear at the time, are precisely the kinds of experiences that stretch our understanding, build our character, and increase our compassion for others.
We can certainly go further than cats, but why should it be that our brains are somehow so suited to the universe that our brains will be able to understand the deepest workings?
No individual can be in full control of his fate-our strengths come significantly from our history, our experiences largely from the vagaries of chance. But by seizing the opportunity to leverage and frame these experiences, we gain agency over them. And this heightened agency, in turn, places us in a stronger position to deal with future experiences, even as it may alter our own sense of strengths and possibilities.
Our brains are continuing to evolve, and perhaps a few tens of thousands of years from now, our descendants will walk around with five pound brains, allowing them insights that we can't imagine.
By seeing life's experiences on through to the end, on our small scale we can finally say, as Jesus did on the cross, "It is finished". We too can then have "finished [our] preparations," having done the particular work God gave each of us to do.
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