Sphere

by Michael Crichton

And he did not think that anxiety as a clinical problem was going to be solved with pills. It seemed to him that a society in which the most common prescription drug was Valium was, by definition, a society with unsolved problems.

It gives you quite a strange feeling to realize the gentle intelligence of these creatures, particularly octopi. You know an octopus is smarter than a dog, and would probably make a much better pet. It’s a wonderful, clever, very emotional creature, an octopus. Only we never think of them that way.”

"Other Minds" by Peter Godfrey-Smith, anyone? :)

“What was the Russian reaction to this discovery?” “We haven’t told the Russians,” Barnes said. “You haven’t told them?” “No. We haven’t.” “But this is an incredible, unprecedented development in human history. Not just American history. Human history. Surely we should share this with all the nations of the world. This is the sort of discovery that could unite all of mankind—” “You’d have to speak to the President,” Barnes said. “I don’t know the reasoning behind it, but

Hiding contact with aliens to showcase own culture/ideas—explored in "Three Body Problem" :)

“the atmosphere of the Earth is deadly. You don’t realize it, but oxygen is a corrosive gas. It’s in the same chemical family as chlorine and fluorine, and hydrofluoric acid is the most corrosive acid known. The same quality of oxygen that makes a half-eaten apple turn brown, or makes iron rust, is incredibly destructive to the human body if exposed to too much of it. Oxygen under pressure is toxic—with a vengeance. So we cut down the amount of oxygen you breathe. You breathe twenty-one percent oxygen at the surface. Down here, you breathe two percent oxygen. But you won’t notice any difference—”

Ted was smiling, wide-eyed, and happy again. You had to admire him, Norman thought—he was so wonderfully irrepressible.

Should always have such a person around!

Harry poked one of the leather pads experimentally, heard the gurgle. “Water-filled.” “Makes perfect sense,” Barnes said. “Water’s not compressible. You can withstand enormous G-forces sitting in a chair like this.”

Won't the seat be as hard as metal at high g-forces?

“I’m talking about research papers, too. Every conception of extraterrestrial life, whether by a movie maker or a university professor, has been basically human—assuming human values, human understanding, human ways of approaching a humanly understandable universe. And generally a human appearance—two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and so on.”

“Therefore this creature,” Harry continued, “may be multidimensional, so that it literally does not exist—at least not entirely—in our usual three dimensions. To take the simplest case, if it were a four-dimensional creature, we would only see part of it at any time, because most of the creature would exist in the fourth dimension. That would obviously make it difficult to kill. And if it were a five-dimensional creature—”

In the sixties, there had been a number of studies of visual perception which demonstrated that subjects interpreted blurred slides according to their predispositions. Hungry people saw all the slides as food.

There are also poisonous plants, poisonous sponges, poisonous corals. And then the snakes. Even the weakest of the sea snakes are invariably lethal.” “Nice,” Harry said. “Well, you have to recognize that the ocean is a much older living environment than the land. There’s been life in the oceans for three and a half billion years, much longer than on land. The methods of competition and defense are much more highly developed in the ocean—there’s been more time.”

“Jung broke with Freud early in this century, and developed his own psychology. Jung suspected there was an underlying structure to the human psyche that was reflected in an underlying similarity to our myths and archetypes. One of his ideas was that everybody had a dark side to his personality, which he called the ‘shadow.’ The shadow contained all the unacknowledged personality aspects—the hateful parts, the sadistic parts, all that. Jung thought people had the obligation to become acquainted with their shadow side. But very few people do. We all prefer to think we’re nice guys and we don’t ever have the desire to kill and maim and rape and pillage.” “Yes …” “As Jung saw it, if you didn’t acknowledge your shadow side, it would rule you.”

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality explored this idea to quite an extent!

The sphere was an alien object which gave a person the power to manifest his thoughts. Well and good, except that human beings had a split in their brains, a split in their mental processes. It was almost as if men had two brains. The conscious brain could be consciously controlled, and presented no problem. But the unconscious brain, wild and abandoned, was dangerous and destructive when its impulses were manifested.

Jeff Hawkins talks about this in "A Thousand Brains" :)

I think we already have evidence that we will forget about it. That solves a logical problem that bothered me from the beginning, when we first explored the ship. Because something very important was missing from that ship.” “Yes? What?” “Any sign that the builders of the ship already knew travel through a black hole was possible.” “I don’t follow you,” Norman said. “Well,” Harry said, “the three of us have already seen a spaceship that has been through a black hole. We’ve walked through it. So we know that such travel is possible.” “Yes …” “Yet, fifty years from now, men are going to build that ship in a very tentative, experimental way, with apparently no knowledge that the ship has already been found, fifty years in their past. There is no sign on the ship that the builders already know of its existence in the past.”

“I don’t think it’s a paradox,” he said. “I think that all knowledge of that ship is going to be lost.” “You mean, we are going to forget it.” “Yes,” Harry said. “And, frankly, I think it’s a much better solution. For a long time while we were down there, I assumed none of us would ever get back alive. That was the only explanation I could think of. That’s why I wanted to make out my will.” “But if we decide to forget …” “Exactly,” Harry said. “If we decide to forget, that will produce the same result.” “The knowledge will be gone forever,” Norman said quietly.