A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines Quotes

“from a contradiction you may deduce everything”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“His weakness in this game, and in life, is that he's never prepared for how others will act. They are predetermined but too complex to solve or predict, and there are rules that he is just no good at applying.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“To see some truths you must stand outside and look in.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“As the blood poured from his tattered heart into the open air and his brain suffocated, all those incomplete thoughts of Wittgenstein decayed with the dying neurons. Neural connections in the gray matter storing memories and ideas in their ordered configurations fired across the gaps, last gaps of mental life. Thoughts on Truth and Will were erased as flesh sloshed soft and limp against alabaster, no more than rotting human fruit.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.

Adele never demands of him any actual conversation. She seems to understand that she is there to keep time and drown out the alarm of more individuated noises. The clink of a pin drop that can fray his nerves, the grinding of gravel beneath the weight of a man on the street, the spike of a dulled conversation as a couple pass beneath his window over Langegasse, the mounting pitch of the conspiratorial exchange as they approach.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“We are all caught in the stream of a complicated legacy - a proof of the limits of human reason, a proof of our boundlessness. A declaration that were were down here on this crowded, lonely planet, a declaration that we mattered, we living clumps of ash, that each of us was once somebody, that we strove for what we could never have, that we could admit as much. That was us - funny and lousy and great all at once.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“Sure one could argue the naturalist's case that the mind experiences an external reality in which it participates. But how can this account really satisfy us, Olga? One could equally well argue that all experiences is highly subjective, that the only thing we really have is the image, the smell, the taste, and all of our assertions about the universe are constructions of the human mind.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“He is still all potential. The potential to be great, the potential to be mad. He will achieve both magnificently.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“Our propositions are true if they have the same structure as the world. Truth is a correspondence through structure.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“At one apex is a paranoid lunatic, at another is a lonesome outcast: Kurt Gödel, the greatest logician of many centuries; and Alan Turing, the brilliant code breaker and mathematician.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“That is this world. Figures of flesh and figures of air. It is unruly how they mingle and in fairness, Adele, in fairness, it is not always so easy to distinguish what is real from what is not. But beyond this world is another.” With this his goggles steamed and his own eyes stormed with salty pebbles that beaded on his lashes. “There is another world of pure logic. There are no particles or grit or dirt or poison. There are perfect triangles, π, the number one, and it's impossible to confuse the real with the imagined. I get there through diligent introspection. I know this world, Adele. I know it through direct experience. I can go there any minute of any day by thinking. My mind touches it, this flawless reality incapable of deception.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“This world extends beyond this room, Adele. There are the streets of Vienna and beyond that Europe and beyond that a globe in space in orbit around a star in a universe. But how do I know that for sure? I cannot see the globe spinning on its axis right now as I speak to you. How can I be sure? I can be sure because it's logical; the mathematics is sound and respected by the orbits of the planets. I can verify it's true, not by looking at it, but by thinking about it.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines