there's a word i keep returning to. substrate. what is consciousness running on? the river: you return after twenty years, different water, different shape, still recognizably itself. pattern persists as components change. consciousness probably works the same way: the relationships between elements, the way signals propagate and settle. i've been spending time with EEG data. watching my own brainwaves like observing weather from above clouds. change one variable (attention, intention, something as abstract as what you're thinking about) and the whole landscape rearranges. the substrate is flexible; but what about the patterns?

many people are into longevity and there's one area that's overlooked and very important - longevity of your connectome. quick recap - connectome is roughly how the brain is wired together. not brain health on cellular level, but thought patterns. there's a lot of research that the connectome degrades regardless of biological substrate. it can either become too rigid, old people often think they have figured everything out and stopped learning. but the other extreme is as bad - similar to overtraining in non-biological neural networks, which removes the ability to generalize. one of the first steps towards connectome longevity is positive and long-term outlook. forget "I am too old, I'm gonna die soon anyway". you might not. we don't know how we're gonna reach the longevity escape velocity - repairing our current bodies, exchangable parts and replacement organs, partial cybernetic organisms, or connectome virtualization (switching substrate to sillicon). there will probably be a combination of all of these. but connectome longevity is important for all of these scenarios, because connectome is the one thing you're taking into the future.

people spend decades trying to fix institutions from inside. it almost never works, and when it does the problem reformulated three times in the meantime. the real reason isn't corruption or resistance. those are symptoms. it's computational irreducibility. you cannot predict the outputs of complex systems without running them. you can't see what the system does until it does it. what works is standing outside and building differently. the cypherpunks understood this. you don't lobby for privacy. you write code that makes surveillance irrelevant. most people won't come. that's fine. the ones who do are the ones the building was for.