Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

electronic pareidolia,

I’m

sobriquet,

ontogeny

phylogeny.

teratogens

‘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.’ ‘On this basis, either everything of sufficient complexity is sentient, whether it feels itself to be or not, or nothing is,’

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

This time with what used to be called moderator privileges,

Because the real problem with a knowledge-based economy is knowing that, no matter how hard you try, most of the information in the universe has already dissolved into entropy before you even evolved. So much is lost that we will never know. Societies rise and fall, and everything ends.