In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.

This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.

I am the thought you are now thinking.

I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.

The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth... because they live on in a 'second neural home'?... In the wake of a human being's death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them... Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain... a collective corona that still glows.

It as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid.

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law