If you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose? Is that programming any different from the way we are p...
Good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.
When you had the world and your body as canvases, why deal in squares of wallpaper?
We have to start doing this in ignorance of the details of how to do it. We have to learn how to do it in the attempt itself. It is something we are going to have to imagine.
Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.
To conclude and temporarily halt this train of thought, how does any entity know what it is? Hypothesis: by the actions it performs. There is a kind of comfort in this hypothesis. It represents a solu...
Thus physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology, history, the arts all interpenetrate each other and cohere if considered as a single convergent study. The physical studies scaffold our unde...
There remained a main melody, or a path through a maze—a maze that was like the delta of the Po. He seemed to look down on it as he sang it. A great number of channels were weaving down a slightly til...
The town was made of cubical buildings with steep roofs, each one painted a bright primary color that through the long winters was said to be cheering.
The servile will is always locked in a double bind: to have a will means the agent will indeed will various actions, following autonomous decisions made by a conscious mind; and yet at the same time t...
The rich, being people too, doing all they could to cope with the night sweats and zombie terrors of making fourteen hundred times as much money as the people working for them, made
Spoofing? No. Ponzi scheme? Not at all! Just finance. Legal as hell.
Someone should enjoy it, Ann said. When she was angry or bitter her voice became flat and distant, almost as if she were being matter-of-fact. It won’t be here long.
Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system...
So you attempt what De Bruik attempted, in her Free Radical Binds to Macromolecule. We all attempt what De Bruik attempted, in one way or another. In Free Radical De Bruik had represented the macromol...
Sax had always been so uninterested in [power and gain] that it was hard for him to understand why anyone else would be. What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what wa...
Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation.
Red Mars! It was transfixing, mesmerizing. Everyone felt it.
Reality is not a matter of our senses. It can’t be visualized.
Only this moment, always. We never get to change the past. We never get to know the future. No reason to wish for one place rather than another; no reason to say I wish I were home, or I wish I were i...