•Altruism starts with a thorough understanding of your every weakness that you want other people to overlook.

This is called valuation in the financial world. Your cost basis is exactly what you can get out of each social exchange over time. Whether you sum the minutes with addition in your head or you map the cost function vs. time/risk on your blade server farm, you are doing basic animal ciphering - friend or foe or something in between based on our last visit.

I need every encounter to end at least slightly in my favor but prefer and seek the encounters with a big payoff. I wheel me a quinella every time we talk in person or over the phone. First in succession is genes. My brother or my sons get any part of my attention that they require. I think I have issues with women because I cannot summon up these feelings for my Mother or my sister. But disregarding my present mental state, everyone else considers kinship in any valuation. Your genes have configured you to work in their service and these same genes insist on preserving copies of themselves.

The winning finish should always go to genes and for the vast number of cases this is true. But the human mind which considers itself sufficient to the task of considering the past, the present and the future does not hesitate to conclude that WHAT it reconstructs of the past by whatever means it reconstructs IS EXACTLY what happened, what is happening and what will happen. Notice that the future is not conditionally buffered by lack of confidence in guesses about what happens in the future.

We continually release press briefings from our 'central conciousness' or a winning mutually beneficial coalition of means against several other losing mutually beneficial coalition of means, to our 'waking self'. The usual subject is 'control signals' from the Central Meaner. The Central Meaner does not exist but we can lean on this sham vestige of the immortal soul for just a bit longer.

The Central Meaner sits behind our eyes, assuming nominal eye-sight. I am the Central Meaner or specifically the meat puppet before you is controlled by the Central Meaner. The Central Meaner revises through multiple drafts the narrative of your life. While things just absolutely fly about around you in a mad scramble of human activity, human language, human visual stimulation and human environmental sensation you normalize and smooth over all of the chaos.

Imagine that you were duct-taped to a dining room chair in a completely dark gymnasium. A figure in total black ninja garb runs at you from the corner of the gym. A green LED is on the ninja's left middle finger and a red LED is on the ninja's right shin. Another ninja runs from the opposite corner with the red LED on the left middle finger and a green LED on the right shin.

The sound system (not a cheap, poor fidelity PA) engulfs you in the sound of a car radio dial on scan. Words and word fragments abruptly shifts from Classic Rock "La Grange" to French Hunting Horns then abruptly to Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliot singing "Scream" then abruptly to Howard Stone.

Remember, this is approximately 1/100000000000000 of the data that you process in HEB shopping for onions. But without context this might as well as have been you against Deep Blue in chess. The only human that might possibly have beat Deep Blue could not make it work twice. Kasparov did not learn as much from the experiment as Deep Blue did. Actually, we do not find it hard to believe that continuous improvements could be expected on a frightening clip from now on.