Everything’s an act. Everything’s strategy.
What’s the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you’re alive?
Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms ...
The static’s nice. I could do without the screeching.” “Are you kidding? That’s the music of the spheres, commissar. It’s . Like old jazz.
Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.
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.
Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.
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.
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.
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.
The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrify...
Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I’m Human again.
I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms." There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. "But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them o...
People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.
got intimacy issues these days, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He must have; the population had been dropping for decades.
You can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to wallow in the sheer beauty of .
You can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.
The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.
