Exhalation

by Ted Chiang

Gate of Seconds,” he said. “This is a Gate of Years. The two sides of the doorway are separated by a span of twenty years.”

death, breaker of ties and destroyer of delights.

“You see clearly,” I admitted. “I realize now that, even though the past is unchangeable, one may encounter the unexpected when visiting it.”

Can the torments of hell be worse than what I endured in the days that followed?

“Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.”

(WHICH OTHERS CALL argon)

Every day we consume two lungs heavy

with air; every day we remove the empty ones from our chest and replace them with full ones.

there is camaraderie derived from the awareness that all our air comes from the same source,

Death is uncommon, fortunately, because we are durable, and fatal mishaps are rare, but it makes difficult the study of anatomy,

the question of memory.

the brain erupts in a cloud of gold, leaving little besides shredded filament and leaf

if all our experiences are in fact recorded, why is it that our memories are incomplete?

as people contemplated for the first time the idea that death was inevitable.

The universe began as an enormous breath being held.

through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you.

the tendency toward equilibrium is not a trait peculiar to our universe but inherent in all universes.

The immediate problem is that Predictors demonstrate that there’s no such thing as free will.

People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable Lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system.

the idea that free will doesn’t exist.

believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma.

the pursuit of truth ceased to be an intrinsic good.

But for our actual selves the relationship between those two actions isn’t so straightforward. In most cases we have to forget a little bit before we can forgive; when we no longer experience the pain as fresh, the insult is easier to forgive, which in turn makes it less memorable, and so on. It’s this psychological feedback loop that makes initially infuriating offenses seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight.

Psychologists make a distinction between semantic memory—knowledge of general facts—and episodic memory, or recollection of personal experiences.

Our memories are private autobiographies,

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn.

writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated.

We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word.

the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.

we are made of stories, and nothing can change that.

The universe is also so old that even one technological species would have had time to expand and fill the galaxy. Yet there is no sign of life anywhere except on Earth. Humans call this the Fermi Paradox.

the hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.

that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.

I speak, therefore I am.

The Earth would be nothing except a boneyard of infinite extent.

“what if God had no intentions about us at all?”

“Science is not just the search for the truth,” he said. “It’s the search for purpose.”

Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.

Information was exchanged using an array of ions, isolated in magnetic traps within the prism.

Can a single quantum event by itself lead to visible changes between the two branches?

weather could affect the course of history.

Experts tried to explain that human decision-making was a classical rather than quantum phenomenon, so the act of making a choice didn’t by itself cause new branches to split; it was quantum phenomena that generated new branches, and your choices in those branches were as meaningful as they ever were.

Edgar Allan Poe had used the phrase “the imp of the perverse” to describe the temptation to do the wrong thing simply because you could, and for many people the imp had become more persuasive.

The conservation of energy means that it is neither created nor destroyed; we are radiating energy constantly, at pretty much the same rate that we absorb it.

“the motif of harmful sensation”: the idea that you could die simply by hearing or seeing something.