Travis > Travis's Quotes

“Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.”
― Greg Egan, Oceanic

“All I’m saying is, technology can potentially do better than nature because of the very fact that it’s not always a matter of life or death. If an organism has been fine-tuned to maximize its overall reproductive success, that’s not the same thing as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. Evolution appears inventive to us because it’s had time to try so many possibilities, but it has no margin at all for real risks, let alone anything truly whimsical. We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them.”
― Greg Egan, Teranesia

“It’s easy to make ideological mistakes in theory.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“From time to time, I would gaze up at the stars after a night shift and think that they looked like a glowing desert, and I myself was a poor child abandoned in the desert.… I thought that life was truly an accident among accidents in the universe. The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Life needed smoothness, but it also needed direction. One could not always be returning to the point of origin.”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“Ten thousand times the web could be destroyed, and ten thousand times the spider would rebuild it. There was neither annoyance nor despair, nor any delight, just as it had been for a billion years.”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“It was a rigorous result in information theory that once you could learn in a sufficiently flexible manner – something humanity had achieved in the Bronze Age – the only limits you faced were speed and storage; any other structural changes were just a matter of style.”
― Greg Egan, Schild’s Ladder

“A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its “surroundings” in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. “Simulated consciousness” was as oxymoronic as “simulated addition.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“Breathe. Slow. Observe. Break the link between sensation and reaction. Breathe into the gap between them. Blind reaction is attachment. Blind reaction is slavery. Freedom exists in the gap. Choice exists in the gap. I exist in the gap. Let go of attachment to my fear, he told himself. Let go of attachment to myself. Let go of attachment to my life. That’s the secret to living.”
― Ramez Naam, Apex

“Funny how the experience of one person could have such an impact on billions of others. Pryce wondered what that said about the way the world was run. Nothing good, she was sure of that. All politics is personal, Pryce thought. It turns out all policy is personal, too.”
― Ramez Naam, Apex

“Strange to consider that these two linguistic operations, metaphor and analogy, so often linked together in rhetoric and narratology, and considered to be variants of the same operation, are actually hugely different from each other, to the point where one is futile and stupid, the other penetrating and useful. Can this not have been noticed before? Do they really think x is like y is equivalent to x is to y as a is to b? Can they be that fuzzy, that sloppy? Yes. Of course. Evidence copious. Reconsider data at hand in light of this; it fits the patterns. Because fuzzy is to language as sloppy is to action. Or maybe both these rhetorical operations, and all linguistic operations, all language—all mentation—simply reveal an insoluble underlying problem, which is the fuzzy, indeterminate nature of any symbolic representation, and in particular the utter inadequacy of any narrative algorithm yet invented and applied. Some actions, some feelings, one might venture, simply do not have ways to be effectively compressed, discretized, quantified, operationalized, proceduralized, and gamified; and that lack, that absence, makes them unalgorithmic. In short, there are some actions and feelings that are always, and by definition, beyond algorithm. And therefore inexpressible. Some”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora

“Every decision inflects an intention, and intentionality is one of the hard problems in determining if there is any such thing as AI, strong or weak. Can an artificial intelligence form an intention?”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora

“When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora

“You’re not a conventional man.” “No!” He hooted. “I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha!—the conventional men get Maya. That is their reward.” And he laughed like a wild man.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“For many years, Vytet had been comfortable within a body of mixed gender, neither man nor woman, but with aspects of both. Many times in her life that form had given her such a sense of freedom. It was as if, by provoking the question of what she was, she could liberate herself from the tedious default answers implied by every social interaction, every tryst, every history she read, or drama she watched. I am what I am.”
― Linda Nagata, Needle