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Kindle Notes & Highlights
An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.
One of my teachers liked to quote Kipling—“And what should they know of England who only England know?”
Einstein thought there was no science without belief in an external world independent of the observer. He didn’t think quantum mechanics was wrong so much as incomplete.”
Tens of thousands understand it, millions make use of it. It’s a matter of time, Charlie. General relativity was once at the outer edge of difficulty. Now it’s routine for first-year undergraduates. The same was true of the calculus. Now fourteen-year-olds can do it. One day quantum mechanics will pass into common sense.”
“Quantum mechanics makes predictions to such a fabulous degree of accuracy, it must be getting something right about nature. To creatures of our immense size, the material world looks blurred and feels hard. But now we know how strange and wonderful it is. So it shouldn’t surprise us that consciousness, your sort and mine, could arise from an arrangement of matter—it’s clearly odd to just the right degree. And we don’t have anything else to explain how matter can think and feel.” Then he added, “Except for beams of love from the eyes of God. But then, beams can be investigated.”
There isn’t vision and then blackness, like you get when you look through binoculars. There isn’t something, then nothing. What we have is the field of vision, and then beyond it less than nothing.”
The edge of vision is a good representation of the edge of consciousness. Life, then death.
We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the
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famous Latin tag from Virgil’s Aeneid. Sunt lacrimae rerum—there are tears in the nature of things.
