1
" He watched the newly arrived commuters as they stepped into the carriage, pushed their way down the tube, the odours from their damp clothes mingling, giving off varying degrees of mustiness: London grime, or smoke from airless offices. A woman wearing a blue swing coat glanced along the carriage, casting around for an empty seat. Her pale skin, the searching green eyes, reminded him of Emma. Briefly, he felt his breath catch; he stood, clambered back over his neighbour and indicated for her to take his seat. And so his mind stayed with Emma when he knew he should be working out a strategy for telling Dorothy of his news. But Emma was never far away; like the glitter balls in dance halls, she would slowly rotate in his memory, different facets reappearing, as the hues changed in her auburn hair. "
― Amanda Sington-Williams , The Eloquence of Desire
5
" 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)
8
" What does a solid, comfortable, impressive handshake look and feel like? To deliver a great handshake . . .
• Extend your right hand out vertically at a comfortable waist level toward the person you are meeting.
• Connect hands with web to web contact made between the thumb and index finger.
• Be intentional and appropriate by showing mutual respect and teamwork.
• Gently squeeze firmly enough to be confident, yet lightly enough to be gracious. Shake a few times for good measure.
• Discreetly rotate your wrist so that your hand is slightly on top of theirs when you want to subconsciously convey self-assurance.
• Make eye contact and smile to show sincerity. Throw in an acknowledging head nod for good measure. Avoiding eye contact may be interpreted that you are not attentive or have something to hide.
• Introduce yourself and when they share their name, repeat it back to them to help you remember it. “It is nice to meet you John.”
• When in doubt, mirror their handshake to adapt to what makes them feel comfortable. Customize accordingly to the gender, age, position, personality, and culture of the person you are meeting. "
― Susan C. Young , The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3)
9
" Hey, Lou?” he hums, casual as anything.“Hm?”“Wanna hear my poem?”Oh dear god. Seriously?Gritting his teeth to keep from laughing or grinning or falling over his own two feet, Louis arches an inquiring eyebrow, turning to meet Harry’s stare. Of course, the bastard is grinning, proud and loud and pleased.Harry blinks, slow enough that Louis briefly wonders if the planet’s begun to rotate slower, has maybe begun to rotate backwards, even. “It goes, ‘He likes me, too. "
10
" Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror. "
― Barry Lopez , About This Life