Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

“C. No. Hear my words. He’s fucking crazy.” “To me he seemed sane but just, I don’t know, excessively literal minded about what he believes?” “Same diff. It’s his religion, man. And he uses it like all the worst religious people.”

Of crows, people tended to predicate the same traits that they did of Asians when they had forgotten politically correct habits of speech, or never acquired them in the first place. Crows were commendably intelligent, and forever busy, but you couldn’t tell them apart and their motives were inscrutable. But living inside of his own head, Corvus well knew his own motives. There was nothing wrong with those motives and he didn’t need to justify them to anyone else.

But then she had asked, in all seriousness, how we could really know what was going on inside of another mind—be it a biological brain or a digital simulation. We took speech and other forms of communication for granted. Computer geeks tended to see those as add-on modules, separate from the brain per se—peripheral devices that could be plugged in, like a microphone or a printer, when some input or output was desirable. Brain scientists considered the input and the output as more fundamental, woven into the neural fabric of the brain.