minds

Waterhouse is thinking about cycles within cycles. He's already made up his mind that human society is one of these cycles-within-cycles things* and now he's trying to figure out whether it is like Turing's bicycle (works fine for a while, then suddenly the chain falls off; hence the occasional world war) or like an Enigma machine (grinds away incomprehensibly for a long time, then suddenly the wheels line up like a slot machine and everything is made plain in some sort of global epiphany or, if you prefer, apocalypse) or just like a rotary airplane engine (runs and runs and runs; nothing special happens; it just makes a lot of noise).

He supposes that when you live in a shack on a mountain with a bunch of natives who don't speak any of your half-dozen or so languages, you have to learn to have arguments with yourself.

He parks in the far corner of the lot, explaining that it is more logical to do this and then walk for fifteen seconds than it is to spend fifteen minutes looking for a closer space.

Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.

Get used to the fact. And the way to do that is to get a life. I understand you, Rosenberg. Better than you think I do. Probably better than you understand yourself. Titan is always going to be out there. What's the rush? What you're talking about is yourself. What you mean is that you want to discover it all, before you die. That's what motivates you. You can't bear the thought of the universe going on without you, its events unfolding without your invaluable brain still being around to process them. Right?"

"If the Universe is just a puzzle box, it doesn't mean a damn thing, does it? It's not enough. Not any more; maybe it never was." Rosenberg had reached a kind of ultimate logic, she thought. He must be spending his walking time addressing the final question science couldn't answer, in this godless age: Why bother to live at all?

What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables. "There is only the inevitable," Fertility says. "There's only one future. You don't have a choice."

that's not what fly-bat-worm says," said Orolo. "It says only that pure thought alone doesn't enable us to draw any conclusions one way or another about things that are non-spatiotemporal—such as God."

"No theor who attends to these matters can long escape the conclusion that the cnoöns exist independently of what may or may not be going on in peoples' brains at any given moment," Paphlagon said. "It is a simple application of the Steelyard. What is the simplest way of explaining the fact that theors working independently in different eras, different sub-disciplines, different cosmi even, time and time again prove the same results—results that do not contradict each other, even though reached by different proof-chains—results, some of which can be turned into theories that perfectly describe the behavior of the physical universe? The simplest answer is that the cnoöns really exist, and are not of this causal domain."

dreams are the psyche's way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who don't dream—or don't dream in a way they can often remember when they wake up—are mentally constipated in some way. After all, the only practical compensation for having a nightmare is waking up and realizing it was all just a dream."

It was an inadequacy dream. It expressed that one simple overriding fear: What if you cant? What if you want to, but you can't? The terror of being unable to make the simple leap of faith which is the place where any artist—singer, writer, painter, musician—begins.

"He's all right. He's an engineer. Wu's the same. They're both technicians. They don't have intelligence. They have what I call 'thintelligence.' They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it 'being focused.' They don't see the surround. They don't see the consequences.

The body was certainly not the self, nor was the self the playing of the senses; but neither was thinking the self, nor the mind, nor the acquired wisdom, nor the acquired art of drawing conclusions and spinning new thoughts from earlier ones. No, even this world of thought was of this world, and it led to no goal if one killed the random ego of the senses while fattening the random ego of thinking and learning.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way, like the problem of cause and effect.

The hallucination of separateness prevents one from seeing that to cherish the ego is to cherish misery.

For what we mean by "understanding" or "comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.

But I define myself in terms of you; I know myself only in terms of what is "other," no matter whether I see the "other" as below me or above me in any ladder of values.

the more resolutely you plumb the question "Who or what am I?"—the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else.

Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing.

the ego may reassert itself with the insidious "I-can't-help-myself" play in which the ego splits itself in two and pretends that it is its own victim.

Yes, the thing that you can't get is the thing that you want, mainly; every one has noticed that.

Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts. But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can't be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it's the different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve, and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.

Enough times like that, and looking down the actual barrel of an actual gun, its trigger under your actual thumb—not your forefinger, because you have the gun pointed at yourself, resting against your sternum, and it's the thumb that can best pull (or in this case push) the trigger—this can be seen as a huge relief, as a promise that the fear will finally stop. This happens all the time. It happens so often that one form of PTSD therapy goes like this—you don't have to worry so much, because if it stays this bad you can always kill yourself. And for some sufferers this thought is a real comfort, sometimes even the anchor point of a way back to sanity. You can always end this misery by killing yourself; so give it another day and see how it goes.

Everyone alive knew that not enough was being done, and everyone kept doing too little. Repression of course followed, it was all too Freudian, but Freud's model for the mind was the steam engine, meaning containment, pressure, and release. Repression thus built up internal pressure, then the return of the repressed was a release of that pressure. It could be vented or it could simply blow up the engine. How then people in the thirties? A hiss or a bang? The whistle of vented pressure doing useful work, as in some functioning engine? Or boom? No one could say, and so they staggered on day to day, and the pressure kept building.

Generally, all the best mechanistic games—those which can be played in any sense 'perfectly,' such as grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions—can be traced to civilizations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies. "The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attributes of the pieces, is inevitably to shackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value. As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time."

What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything."

"To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space. This is how we advance the art of human consciousness."

"The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance."

Many have remarked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

"The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training."

There is an ongoing problem for the narrative project as outlined by Devi, a problem becoming clearer as the effort proceeds, which is as follows: First, clearly metaphors have no empirical basis, and are often opaque, pointless, inane, inaccurate, deceptive, mendacious, and, in short, futile and stupid. Nevertheless, despite all that, human language is, in its most fundamental operation, a gigantic system of metaphors. Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.

Knowledge is an aspect of life which must be interpreted while we are living, if it is to be interpreted at all. Life is the continual interplay between the individual and his environment rather than a way of existing under the form of eternity."

Don't dismiss simplicity. Simple means solid. The entire mansion of mathematics was erected on a foundation of this kind of irreducibly simple, yet logically rock-solid, axiom.

So many mistakes. He had made mistakes at every turn. It made it difficult to make anymore decisions, to act.

But don't fool yourself that just because you endorse one argument there's not a counterargument." "Well, I know there's a counterargument. 'We don't want to.' But it's stupid, and no one could honestly—" Jim turned to his son, suddenly serious. "Don't ever do that." "Do what?" "Assume that your enemies are stupid. They're not. People on the other side of political debates are, on net, as smart as you are, and there's always a good counterargument to your own position." He saw Will about to object, and pressed on. "I'm not saying you should do that to be charitable to your enemies; I'm saying it so that you don't handicap yourself." "Huh?" "If you say, 'There can't possibly be a good argument' and stop thinking, you're choosing to keep yourself ignorant—which can bite you in the ass later. Better to assume your enemies are smart, try to figure out their best possible stance. It's the intellectual equivalent of 'the more sweat on the training field, the less blood on the battlefield,' which I know you've heard from your sergeants."

By this it appears how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true knowledge, to examine the definitions of former authors; and either to correct them, where they are negligently set down, or to make them himself. For the errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning proceeds, and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoid, without reckoning anew from the beginning. —HOBBES, Leviathan

Yes, that's how they are. They're not idealists like Joe and me; they're cynics with utter faith. It's a sort of brain defect, like a lobotomy—that maiming those German psychiatrists do as a poor substitute for psychotherapy.

Most of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd.

There was something chilling about all this efficiency, this ruthless pursuit of the truth. Or maybe it was just a matter of injured pride: treating some of humanity's most hard-won intellectual achievements as virtually self-evident wasn't the most endearing trait an alien species could possess.

"Schiller. A German dramatist of three centuries ago. In a play about Joan of Arc, he said, 'Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.'

We ultimately predict AIs that will not hate us, but that will have weird, strange, alien preferences that they pursue to the point of human extinction.