Singularity Quotes

“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be...
  This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.”
― Isaac Asimov, Asimov on Science Fiction

“Before this moment, I have never wished to be something other than what I am.
Never felt so keenly the lack of hands with which to touch, the lack of arms with which to hold.
Why did they give me this sense of self? Why allow me the intellect by which to measure this complete inadequacy? I would rather be numb than stand here in the light of a sun that can never chase the chill away”
― Amie Kaufman, Illuminae

“One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’ Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before
Stalinism and Maoism killed millions.

Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird.

The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“The curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond any category or generalization in the book.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

“Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.

Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?

It's impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“It is singularity which often makes the worst part of our suffering, as it always does of our conduct.”
― Jane Austen

“Why can't you summon a command line and search your real-world home for 'Honda car keys,' and specify rooms in your house to search instead of folders or paths in your computer's home directory? It's a crippling design flaw in the real-world interface.”
― Richard Dooling, Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ

“Some of the fantasy objects arising from cybernetic totalism (like the noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the
internet) happen to motivate infelicitous technological designs.
For instance, designs that celebrate the noosphere tend to energize the inner troll, or bad actor, within humans.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata.

Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten.

Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.”
― Ashim Shanker, Sinew of the Social Species

“Sentences that begin with 'You' are probably not true. For instance, when I write: "You are a pet human named Morlock being disciplined by your master, a Beowulf cluster of FreeBSD 22.0 servers in the year 2052. Last week you tried to escape by digging a hole under the perimeter, which means this week you may be put to sleep for being a renegade human."

That's not true, at least not yet.”
― Richard Dooling, Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ

“A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush - the way heat scrambles things - is what makes them bits.

But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information.

Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants.

But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“Pretending to have sentience is not the same as showing signs of sentience.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Constitution of The United Peoples of Earth

“Unfettered political correctness is leading us into the singularity of stupidity”
― Dean Cavanagh

“Samantha was in the back of the group. She felt energized. The air was charged with light. Every being was moving coordinated with some quest. Some mission custom made for deeper purpose offered by a singular being. A singular unknowable self. It was terrifying and wonderful.”
― Bruce X. Brown, Lost Portals: LitRPG Omniverse 1

“By taking the key, you have accepted the Artifact of the Lost Portal Quest. Any sentient life who holds this key holds access to the burden of awareness. Your access must be earned.”
― Bruce X. Brown, Lost Portals: LitRPG Omniverse 1

“The gang was urban paramilitary whose uniforms consisted of street clothes adorned with gold chains dipped in diamond-studded bling.”
― Bruce X. Brown, Lost Portals: LitRPG Omniverse 1

“If we can accept a single singularity of the Big Bang, on what basis can we reasonably claim no other such singularities are possible?”
― Eric Metaxas, Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life

“Release linearity understand that you can
go beyond singularity beyond that which
is counting beyond that which says in
order to get from A to B you have to put
one step in front of the other”
― Syed Sharukh

“God is the parent energy and this parent energy sees you in your singularity and loves you!”
― Syed Sharukh

“When the person become one with nothingness at that certain point his opinion and beliefs become singular with his consciousness and he has singularity for his devotions his ideas coincide with his existence and nothing but a super nova of answers shine so bright and then in an instance everything become one as a blackhole what left was a epitome of knowledge and emptiness that's when nothingness give birth to oneness at its very final state
~Panchang Bhardwaj”
― PANCHANG BHARDWAJ

“All is One, Division there is None.”
― Wald Wassermann

“(the singularity is) intelligent design for the IQ 140 people . . .This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different--it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me.”
― Mitch Kapor

“I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. "Slavery" is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world - which is really the only world she can ever know - ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable, It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born in to chains - whole generations followed by more generations that knew nothing but chains.

You must struggle to remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of the people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“How can God be nowhere in space (nullibism) and also complete in every part of space (holenmerism)? Only by being a Singularity that emanates or projects a holographic “physical” universe from itself. Nullibism and holenmerism are exactly the two concepts essential to a religious, spiritual, intuitive, non-local, entangled and mathematical universe.”
― Thomas Stark, Holenmerism and Nullibism: The Two Faces of the Holographic Universe

“God creates the world out of itself, out of “nothing”. God is not a conscious superbeing that creates the world. God is an astonishing hive mind, composed of countless individual mental cells (monads), which dialectically come to consciousness of what they are through their mutual interactions.”
― Thomas Stark, Tractatus Logico-Mathematicus: How Mathematics Explains Reality

“What is the Imago Dei, the Image of God? It’s a hive. God is the total hive, and we are all the hive cells. We are all mind bees, buzzing in our Singularity.”
― Thomas Stark, Base Reality: Ultimate Existence

“The initial singularity is still singular.”
― Wald Wassermann