Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was five years my senior. I never expected to be immortal but at my age one starts becoming aware that you have more weeks behind your back than in front of you. I like to think that living is just untangling a web that somehow fate has already set for you. So in the end what counts is living each and every moment as if it was the most important one, and loving and caring about the people that love and care about…
While I like the sound of a mentality that suggests paying attention to every moment, it does raise the question: pay attention at what level? Count the leaves on every tree? This question motivates a different follow-up question: how should we pay attention? Our senses can be deceived, so we should also use reason and conceptual understandings to literally enrich (de-noise perhaps) our raw senses? But some philosoph…
I mean it's obviously sensible. In the context of binary information in a computer, for instance, we (generally) don't care about exact voltages, we group it all together as 0 or 1. And talking about genetic information, we don't (usually) care about, say, if a slightly unusual isotope has snuck in in one of the usual nucleic acids, since that "information" isn't copied in the usual way.
It's very obvious, but it's also more profound than it looks. Even for something as seemingly purely mathematical as information, there's actually teleology, assumptions about what matters, baked in every time we apply it.