My gf told me the other day that I am floating above time, don't belong to neither past nor future. I just am. Recently I have been thinking a lot about detachment. Philosophers claim it's a basis for happiness. It certainly feels good to cut lose. The most powerful idea for me crystallized in the form of reality being sliding window of time: today, next week/last week. Not much happens in there or you could say so much does in fact happen that you don't have time for anything else. So many breaths. So many movements of the eyes. How many times has the hair on your forearms shifted direction like an array of radio antennae? If I am to take this image seriously, I am indeed floating. Last year? Not me anymore. Where do I see myself in ten years? Nowhere, today's me will not exist then. I could just as well be printed into a new body every morning to have a thought or two, love someone and make a friend laugh, done. Let the next me come. I feel this is a very modern version of *Weltflucht*. Normal people get themselves responsibilities and meaning. They reason with the *Ewige Wiederkehr*, important things will happen time and again and shape their lives. They will be the person who has stayed or worked hard to amass a fortune. Not only have I not done that, I am unconvinced that's the only way to lead a good life. I am writing this as someone who's inventing immortality by technological means in his sci-fi. Without attachment, continuity does not matter. Life and death does not. Because I feel something unbecoming when I enter this flowing mood, guilt maybe? Fear of not caring? I think about imagined consequences of my actions, possible parallel universes in which I acted differently and how little I have done of myself over the years of my life. I believe deep down that it is not possible to detach. The cynical Cioran says: once you don't desire you are here and there, creatively Christian Kierkegaard holds that as you'll regret anything you do, you should be ethical. A friend of mine calls on both: all is regret, all is fine. But what is it good for, if you don't care? Not having an answer to that question I turn to explore the idea of floating more. If you are outside of time, live instants but don't sum their succession, you give up a foundational notions of space. Measure. Your world becomes a bubble, limited by whatever actions you can accumulate. There is no transmission. At the end of a bubble a new one starts. That's maybe a good analogy for how a series of humans live internally. They can never fully transmit what they feel through and that state of mind disappears with them only to give room for another. One person accumulates themselves into the world sometimes infinitely close to another without ever being able to meet. There is some transmission so even though there is no geometry to construct a theory of mind where all humans take part, there is a topology in which it endures in the sense that whatever we do get to see from another, we understand in our own way. All intelligences really, humans, artificial, animal, alien. If every possible mind could meet any other, I'd guess there would be a way to connect, to transmit any mind to any other. Intelligences are close in that they map experience of the world. Many map onto one. Surely, if we multiply reasoning about the same things, we would eventually just exhaust all the possibilities, built a continuous space of mind. There might be different types, mutually unintelligable in the whole, but you would just piece together chunks of mind that match. But even then, if you were to plot a path through minds, you would never be able to find back. You also depend on the world you map at a point in time. The time it takes to reason is probably what defines which paths we can take in this space. The n-holes of a torus. One person cannot map out every point. Fewer minds coexist with us. They might or might not be close. To be out of time, in a world of unconnected bubbles is an ideal that cannot be reached. But you can realize that the connection might be unintelligible for you, because you have nothing to measure it by. What matters about transmission then is that it connects. No other judgement is possible. And even if you were to do nothing, you would still have an effect that would be as unpredictable as the most thought out teaching curriculum. So if we could transmit ourselves, what would we hold fixed? What would we care about? Our body? The memory of the people we loved? Our dreams or habits or thought patterns? A body can be good or bad depending on mood. People we love might become people we forget. Habits might compound constructively or destructively in a changing environment. What if death is not an end to avoid but a healthy reset of an endlessly bubbling surface that permeates the world, a moment of calibration for the aggregated intellect, God cleaning their coffee grinder? Being exactly oneself for ever is a fallacy. You might be enjoying a moment of your life. But that is not by design, you did not get to chose because you can't even measure the situation. It's a coincidence. You could not guarantee yourself the same conditions so who's to say that your next generation, will be equally happy? They'll be alive and able to make choices for themselves, I want to say, but they might just never get it right again and from the promise of possibility could come the fear of suffering. Maybe you have the choice to die, but that is a decision with a sample size and even less likely to be a good one. What you gain in a bubble-like world of mind is freedom of consequence. Neither does your past weigh on you for long, nor do mistakes carry on too far into the future. It does not matter what you do and so you can experiment. If we don't die it is a gradual improvement: a whole life time can be research. But then it is only one more step to desire specific change. Eternal life as a self you would recognize today is not that appealing, rather, we would like to change willingly. Then over time every person would at some point be everything a human can be or even more, any possible iteration of intelligence. How a particular mind wrapped itself around a particular state of the world still be a mystery at any point. And just as I don't really feel like myself 20 years ago, I probably would not think that the being I created based on myself 150 years from now has anything much in common with me. So let the technology come. The underlying feeling remains the same. I am only fully real right now. No matter how much I care about temporal continuity, I have no understanding of the transmission of state and so the next me will be a complete surprise. Life is a bubble around now. It will morph and twist into the bubble of tomorrow. But for me it might as well burst for another one to take it's place - I wouldn't be able to compare the outcomes.