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Sometimes, you play the cards. Sometimes, you play the player. Sometimes, you just throw the dice.
The goal of the Homo quantus project had been to engineer humans capable of discarding their consciousness and subjectivity so as not to collapse quantum phenomena.
The Anglo-Spanish penal system either struck visitors as refreshingly civilized or as stingingly rapacious. Sentences could be commuted or pardoned for large cash payments, or for the transfer of assets such as stock or annuities. Absent this, prison corporations happily extended moderate-interest sentence-mortgages to a sponsor, or even to parolees themselves.
As intelligence was an emergent property of life, so games of controlled chance were an emergent property of intelligence.
I’ve read the Way of the Mongrel, Belisarius said. I can quote some of the good bits. “Bite every hand. Piss on everyone’s leg. Lick your balls if you can find them.” You forgot, “Unless you’re doing the fucking, you’re getting fucked.” That’s an important one.
I live in an observer-dependent world where very important things can exist and not exist at the same time.”
the important take-away is the nature of Lucifer’s suffering. To be out of the presence of God is to suffer.”
“I can half believe you. I can half doubt you. Doubt and belief are just another way of stating probability.”
Life is short and life isn’t fair. You’ve got to grab it and own it before it owns you.
Human history was a concatenation of power struggles and people trying to get away with whatever they could, until someone strong enough came along to stop them.
The objective intellect she became was not conscious in even the most rudimentary sense. She was a machine of flesh ridden by a web of algorithms that could in no way even be called a person.
“Theology is the queen of the sciences.
“The Numen reject their own divinity, while quite obviously being divine. The cosmos has conspired to make them incapable of seeing certain truths. That doesn’t make you less divine, but more.”
They’re struggling for who’s in charge and who has the most money when questions of how the cosmos works are all around them, unanswered.
The Numen were forces of chaos and power, as much as the Titans were to the Greek gods, a savagery to be tamed.”
Intelligence was the first sense to see through time instead of space.
there’s so little holding me to me.”
the first three verses of the Way of the Mongrel,” he said. “‘You were born dead under the tomb of an ocean. It’s never going to get any better. And you’re fucked.’”
