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Ultimately, all science is correlation. No matter how effectively it may use one variable to describe another, its equations will always ultimately rest upon the surface of a black box. (Saint Herbert might have put it most succinctly when he observed that all proofs inevitably reduce to propositions that have no proof.) The difference between Science and Faith, therefore, is no more and no less than predictive power. Scientific insights have proven to be better predictors than Spiritual ones, at least in worldly matters; they prevail not because they are true, but simply because they work.
EITHER WAR IS OBSOLETE, OR MEN ARE. —R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
We don’t look out at reality at all, we look in at this model, this caricature our brains cobble together out of wavelengths and pressure points. We squint down over handwritten notes that say two blocks east, turn left at the bridge and we think that reading those stupid scribbles is the same as seeing the universe passing by on the other side of the windshield.”
I AM LARGE, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES. —WALT WHITMAN
IF YOU ARE GIVEN A CHOICE, YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACTED FREELY. —RAYMOND TELLER
“Have a drink,” he said. “Helps the future go down easier.”
Mostly he just virtualized; his grants weren’t big enough to let him jet his actual biomass around the planet.
REALITY IS THAT WHICH, WHEN YOU STOP BELIEVING IN IT, DOESN’T GO AWAY. —PHILIP K. DICK
programmable metamaterial
“The Silences of Pone. Like a game you can only watch. Lee says it’s one of—you know, back when they couldn’t just induce desired states directly. They had to manipulate you into feeling things. With plot and characters and so on.” “Art,” Moore said. “I remember.” “Pretty crude by current standards but apparently it won a whole bunch of awards for neuroinduction back in the day. Lee found it in the cache, set up a feed. Says it’s worth watching.”
No TPN suppression, no Semmelweis reflex. They’re immune to inattentional blindness and hyperbolic discounting, and, Oldschool, that synesthesia of theirs—they reset millions of years of sensory biases with that trick. Randomized all the errors, just like that. And it’s not just the mundane sensory stuff, it’s not just feeling color and tasting sounds. They can literally see time
Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.
