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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me? —John Milton, Paradise Lost
“Why do you keep going to the limits?” “To know what is there, and what comes after.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
“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.”
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.
