"What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?"
- Peter Watts
"If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert"
"Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding into the fu..."
"Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, ..."
"Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building?..."
"I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough..."
"After four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer."
"The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest."
"Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness a..."
"You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?"