Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Things fall apart, though, and entropy is the landlord whose rent always gets paid.

We seek for every possibility of life and sentience, because the universe is vast and cold and mostly empty, and variance from that void is to be treasured.

Sometimes tomorrow’s just a today that got lost.

“The essential fallacy,” Gothi picks up, “is that humans and other biologically evolved, calculating engines feel themselves to be sentient, when sufficient investigation suggests this is not so. And that sentience, as imagined by the self-proclaimed sentient, is an illusion manufactured by a sufficiently complex series of neural interactions. A simulation, if you will.”

“We think that it is better not to be sentient. Imagine how hard that would be, to actually have to think about things all the time.”

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Knowledge and understanding is the crown atop the hierarchy of needs, the thing you can’t have enough of.