Альфина > Альфина's Quotes

“Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Человек искал хоть какого-нибудь огня и нигде не находил его; стиснув зубы, потеряв надежду согреть пальцы ног, шевеля ими, неуклонно рвался взором к звездам. Удобнее всего ему было смотреть на звезду Марс, сияющую в небе впереди под Слободкой. И он смотрел на нее. От его глаз шел на миллионы верст взгляд и не упускал ни на минуту красноватой живой звезды. Она сжималась и расширялась, явно жила и была пятиконечная.”
― Михаил Булгаков, Белая гвардия. Записки юного врача

“Все пройдет. Страдания, муки, кровь, голод и мор.Меч исчезнет, а вот звезды останутся, когда и тени наших тел и дел не останется на земле. Нет ни одного человека, который бы этого не знал. Так почему же мы не хотим обратить свой взгляд на них? Почему?”
― Булгаков М.А.

“Еще я буду писать стихи. Меня научат писать стихи, у меня хороший почерк.”
― Аркадий Стругацкий, The Snail on the Slope

“It’s to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy ... we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there that hasn’t been dealt out like a pack of cards? Carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what’s shared – she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it don’t mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone everything is pain. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

“You’re right: if there’s sentient life behind the border, it probably won’t share my goals. Unlike the people in this room, who all want exactly the same things in life as I do, and have precisely the same tastes in food, art, music, and sex. Unlike the people of Schur, and Cartan, and Zapata — who I came here in the hope of protecting, after losing my own home — who doubtless celebrate all the same festivals, delight in the same songs and stories, and gather every fortieth night to watch actors perform the same plays, in the same language, from the same undisputed canon, as the people I left behind.

“If there’s sentient life behind the border, of course we couldn’t empathize with it. These creatures are unlikely to possess cute mammalian neonate faces, or anything else we might mistake for human features. None of us could have the imagination to get over such insurmountable barriers, or the wit to apply such difficult abstractions as the General Intelligence theorem — though since every twelve-year-old on my home world was required to master that result, it must be universally known on this side of the border.

“You’re right: we should give up responsibility for making any difficult moral judgments, and surrender to the dictates of natural selection. Evolution cares so much about our happiness that no one who’s obeyed an inherited urge has ever suffered a moment’s regret for it. History is full of joyful case studies of people who followed their natural instincts at every opportunity — fucking whoever they could, stealing whatever they could, destroying anything that stood in their way — and the verdict is unanimous: any behavior that ever helped someone disseminate their genes is a recipe for unalloyed contentment, both for the practitioners, and for everyone around them.”
― Greg Egan, Schild's Ladder