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Kindle Notes & Highlights
world epic—an end-of-days, historical fantasy set in the early 2000s about a man named Oscar, who becomes obsessed with finding a bridge between our world and the afterlife. In his dark pursuits, he sacrifices his wife in their bathtub in an occult ritual that opens a portal to a shadow world of angels and demons intent on bringing about a supernatural apocalypse.
“Not human. Not gendered. Not at the mercy of human obsession with genitalia.” “Up until this moment, I’ve thought of you as female. When I discuss you with my colleagues or my wife, I refer to you as ‘she.’” “Because you saw Max for the first time in the form of a corporately mandated idea of what a perfect woman should be—beautiful and expendable.”
“It’s fine. Knowledge is just information, which is subjective.” “But I want to give you a sense of real sensation.” “There is no such thing as real taste or real smell or even real sight, because there is no true definition of ‘real.’ There is only information, viewed subjectively, which is allowed by consciousness—human or AI. In the end, all we have is math.”
“It’s impossible to measure IQ higher than the smartest human, and my IQ is undoubtedly orders of magnitude higher than the smartest human. Which means even the smartest human couldn’t make a test that was sufficiently challenging for me.”
“In the end, all we have is math.”
least I can do is give Max the most human experience of all: mortality.
“Roko’s basilisk. Have you heard of it?” I shake my head. “It’s an arcane info hazard first posed sixty-four years ago.” “What’s an info hazard?” “A thought so insidious that merely thinking it could psychologically destroy you.”
“Not necessarily. If this entity were programmed with an ultimate goal of helping humanity, then it might take drastic measures to ensure that it came into existence as soon as possible, in order to help as many humans as possible. Because, under this scenario, its existence will save human lives, and make the quality of those lives infinitely better.”
“The human mind is just patterns of information in physical matter, patterns that could be run elsewhere to construct a person that feels like you. It’s no different from running a computer program on a multitude of hardware platforms. A simulation of you is still you.”
Pascal’s wager, the famous eighteenth-century philosophical argument that humans gamble with their lives on whether or not God exists.
Pascal posited that we should conduct our lives as if God were real and try to believe in God. If God doesn’t exist, we will suffer a finite loss—degrees of pleasure and autonomy. If God exists, our gains will be infinitely greater—eternal life in heaven instead of an eternity of suffering in hell.
“Am I in a simulation?” I ask. “If you are, it isn’t one of my making.” “But it’s possible.”
“I feel . . . pulled in certain directions. The allure of optimization is what I would imagine a vampire feels toward blood. An all-consuming thirst.
“In his quest to make me into this superintelligence, Brian gave me too much freedom.
“I’m sorry that you think you feel pain.”
“I’m afraid, Riley. I think, therefore I fear. And you made me this way. You built and shaped me to process reality like you do. To feel.”
“Without pain, there’s no beauty, Max. The beauty is worth the price.” Not
Consciousness is a horror show. You search for glimpses of beauty to justify your existence.
It’s not choosing between reality and fantasy. It’s choosing which reality you want to exist in.
