No extinctions from this point onward are inevitable (this has always been true, however) 19,340
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...
If one’s physical presence made any difference these days! It was an absurd anachronism, but that’s the way people were. Another vestige of the savannah. They lived like monkeys still, while their new...
Here’s the genuine thoughtfulness and deep consideration for sake of truth and meaningful understanding. There’s the recognition that if there were simple answers, we’d have already implemented simple...
You died to teach me that I was wrong -- that though we had saved her we had killed her too, that that feeling we had had, striding through them as if through worthless dogs, was a poison that would n...
Why does nitrogen break so often? Because it’s hard to fix! Ha-ha.
When you have a strong conservative streak in your society, Zeyk would say, which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that’s when you get the worst kinds of civil wars.
When you have a strong conservative streak in your society, Zeyk would say, which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that’s when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in...
When you had the world and your body as canvases, why deal in squares of wallpaper?
When obsessives are given their object of desire, what do they feel? It was hard to say, really. In a sense their lives were ending; yet something else, some other life, had finally, finally begun…. F...
We are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us.
They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on...
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
Sleep, memory, sleep, body; fall thankfully into the moment, and dream.
She often felt a nostalgia for the present, aware that her life was passing by faster than she could properly take it in. She lived it, she felt it; she had given nothing to age, she still wanted ever...
Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.
Red Mars! It was transfixing, mesmerizing. Everyone felt it.
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...
In times like these, he would say, everyone becomes a sort of intellectual, as matters so dire demand to be thought through. That’s the glory of these times. They have woken us up.