Commmit Quotes & Sayings

Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience ...
If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic.
Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion.
Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real. — Jaron Lanier

Life has me trapped in a cocoon of earth where I must grow and change until the day I sprout wings. And on that day I shall burst free, no longer marooned on a pebble of dust in a universe that only waits for me to find a means to fly. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I've occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right. — Jaron Lanier

Natural selection based on the differential multiplication of variant types cannot exist before there is material capable of replicating itself and its own variations, that is, before the origination of specifically genetic material or gene-material. — Hermann Joseph Muller

Most people associate command and control leadership with the military. — Margaret J. Wheatley

Maddox is his polar opposite. He has just as many muscles, but on him they look huge and imposing. His brown hair is longer than Zeke's, sporting that messy look like he was running his hands through it all day - sex hair. — Brooke Cumberland

The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

It's stupid. There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be. — Anthony Marra

I pulled my hand away. It felt numb and oversized, a paw. — Wally Lamb

this is the monumental error of counterinsurgency: despite its success absorbing the asymmetry introduced by guerilla tactics, it still continues to produce the figure of the "terrorist" based on what it is itself. And this is to our advantage, then, provided we don't allow ourselves to embody that figure. It's what all effective revolutionary strategy must accept as its point of departure. The failure of the American strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan bears witness. Counterinsurgency did such a good job of turning "the population" around that the Obama administration has to routinely and surgically assassinate, via drone, anything that might resemble an insurgent — Anonymous

Human life [is] ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait. — Eric Berne

It was the mystery that biologists from Darwin onwards had been longing to solve. How could we understand the ability of fish and seals to survive in the cold dark waters of the Antarctic? How could humans see inside a biotope that was sealed with layers of ice? What would the Earth look like from the sky, if we crossed the Mediterranean on the back of a goose? How did it feel to be a bee? How could we measure the speed of an insect's wings and its heartbeat, or monitor its blood pressure and eating patterns? What was the impact of human activities, like shipping noise or subsea explosions, on mammals in the depths? How could we follow animals to places where no human could venture? — Frank Schatzing