What’s the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?
If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert
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? Become a protozoan.
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.
You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?
The neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness.
You can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.
Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I’m Human again.
The static’s nice. I could do without the screechi
But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.
There’s no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn’t matter whether a solution’s optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.
It’s kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.
Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life meunderstand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.
I don’t understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.
Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.
Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.
Maybe your empathy’s just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you’re only feeling yourself, maybe you’re even worst than me. Or maybe we’re all just guessing.
Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable.
Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.
But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.
What’s the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you’re alive?
Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.
It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing.
Word of advice,” the Colonel said from the other side. “Don’t tease the zombies.
It’s really kind of… well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know ‘em. We’re all beautiful.