We create an image of who we are inside our self. The image then becomes very deeply entrenched, and it becomes the thing that we attribute responsibility to - we say "I", "I" did this because "I" wanted to, because "I" am a good person or because "I" am a bad person. The loop is the fact that we represent our selves, our desires, hopes, dreads and dreams: it is the way in which we conceive of ourselves, rather than the way we conceive of Mount Everest or of a tree. And I say it exists entirely in the loop: the self is an hallucination hallucinated by an hallucination.

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

Irrationality is the square root of all evil.

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

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

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you' makes more decisions, and so forth, 'round and 'round.