41
" Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.
I explored it all.
Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself.
Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain.
All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question.
Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first. "
― , Blindsight (Firefall, #1)
45
" What a skeletal wreck of man this is.
Translucent flesh and feeble bones,
the kind of temple where the whores and villains try to tempt the holistic domes.
Running rampid with free thought to free form, and the free and clear.
When the matters at hand are shelled out like lint at a
laundry mat to sift and focus on the bigger, better, now.
We all have a little sin that needs venting,
virtues for the rending and laws and systems and stems are ripped
from the branches of office, do you know where your post entails?
Do you serve a purpose, or purposely serve?
When in doubt inside your atavistic allure, the value of a summer spent, and a winter earned.
For the rest of us, there is always Sunday.
The day of the week the reeks of rest, but all we do is catch our breath,
so we can wade naked in the bloody pool, and place our hand on the big, black book.
To watch the knives zigzag between our aching fingers.
A vacation is a countdown, T minus your life and
counting, time to drag your tongue across the sugar cube,
and hope you get a taste.
WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THIS FOR?
WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON? SHUT UP!
I can go on and on but lets move on, shall we?
Say, your me, and I’m you, and they all watch the things we do,
and like a smack of spite they threw me down the stairs,
haven’t felt like this in years.
The great magnet of malicious magnanimous refuse, let me go,
and punch me into the dead spout again.
That’s where you go when there’s no one else around,
it’s just you, and there was never anyone to begin with, now was there?
Sanctimonious pretentious dastardly bastards with their thumb on the pulse,
and a finger on the trigger.
CLASSIFIED MY ASS! THAT’S A FUCKING SECRET, AND YOU KNOW IT!
Government is another way to say better…than…you.
It’s like ice but no pick, a murder charge that won’t stick,
it’s like a whole other world where you can smell the food,
but you can’t touch the silverware.
Huh, what luck. Fascism you can vote for.
Humph, isn’t that sweet?
And we’re all gonna die some day, because that’s the American way,
and I’ve drunk too much, and said too little,
when your gaffer taped in the
middle, say a prayer, say a face, get your self together and see what’s happening.
SHUT UP! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!
I’m sorry, I could go on and on but
their times to move on so, remember: you’re a wreck, an accident.
Forget the freak, your just nature.
Keep the gun oiled, and the temple cleaned shit snort,
and blaspheme, let the heads cool, and the engine run.
Because in the end, everything we do, is just everything we’ve done. "
― , Stonesour
50
" Suddenly life was good, even glamorous. We were poor but didn’t know it, or maybe we did know, but we didn’t care, because my mother had stopped disappearing into her bedroom. Our apartment building was surrounded by empty lots, which were all that separated us from the ocean. Within a couple of decades, those stretches of undeveloped land – prime coastline real estate –would be built upon, with upscale apartment complexes and million-dollar houses with ocean views. But in 1967, those barren lots were our magnificent private playground. I had a tomboy streak and recruited neighborhood boys onto an ad hoc softball team. Dieter and my mother installed a tetherball pole, which acted as a magnet for kids in the neighborhood. For the first time in years, we were enjoying what felt like a normal, quasi-suburban existence, with us at the center of everything–the popular kids with the endless playground. "
