Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, … - Douglas Hofstadter

Perhaps the greatest contradiction in our lives, the hardest to handle, is the knowledge 'There was a time when I was not alive, and there will come a time when I am not alive.' On one level, when you 'step out of yourself' and see yourself as 'just another human being', it makes complete sense. But on another level, perhaps a deeper level, personal nonexistence makes no sense at all. All that we know is embedded inside our minds, and for all that to be absent from the universe is not comprehensible. This is a basic undeniable problem of life...

By the time we emerge from childhood, we have acquired a reflex-level intuition for where most of our everyday world’s loci of unpredictability lie, and the more unpredictable end of this spectrum simultaneously beckons to us and frightens us. We’re pulled by but fearful of risk-taking. That is the nature of life.

"One of the greatest problems for systems programmers (the people who write compilers, interpreters, assemblers, and other programs to be used by many people) is to figure out how to write error-detecting routines in such a way that the messages which they feed to the user whose program has a "bug" provide high-level, rather than low-level, descriptions of the problem. it is an interesting reversal that when something goes wrong in a genetic "program" (e.g., a mutation), the "bug" is manifest only to people on a high level - namely on the phenotype level, not the genotype level. Actually, modern biology uses mutations as one of its principal windows onto genetic processes, because of their multilevel traceability."