Schild's Ladder QUOTES

1 " You’ll never stop changing, but that doesn’t
mean you have to drift in the wind. Every day, you can take
the person you’ve been, and the new things you’ve witnessed,
and make your own, honest choice as to who you should become.
“Whatever happens, you can always be true to yourself. But
don’t expect to end up with the same inner compass as anyone
else. Not unless they started beside you, and climbed beside
you every step of the way. "

― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder

2 " My earliest memories are of CP4 — that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex directions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this" — he motioned at the surrounding more-or-less-Euclidean space — for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single three-dimensional space. "

― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder

3 " It was a rigorous result in information theory that once you could learn in a sufficiently flexible manner – something humanity had achieved in the Bronze Age – the only limits you faced were speed and storage; any other structural changes were just a matter of style. "

― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder

4 " 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

5 " There's nothing worse than a label to cement people's loyalties. "

― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder

6 " You don't take a traveler for a partner if you hope that the world will always stay the same. You do it because you can't quite break away, yourself, but you can't live without the promise of change hanging over you every day.

That's what the border means, for a lot of people. The promise of change they'd never be able to make any other way. "

― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder

7 " It was the kind of behavior that could only occur when people had been trapped for thousands of years, staring at the same sights, fetishizing everything around them, spiraling down toward the full-blown insanity of religion. You didn’t need gates and barbed wire to make a prison. Familiarity could pin you to the ground, far more efficiently. "

― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder

8 " That was the hazard she’d face every day, here: not just the risk that she’d give in to temptation, but the risk that all the principles she’d chosen to define herself would come to seem like nothing but masochistic nonsense. "

― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder

9 " Whoever first gains the power to impose their own view decides the issue? Isn’t that the definition of barbarism? "

― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder

10 " Isn’t there a level where both sides can still cooperate? "

― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder

11 " My earliest memories are of CP4 – that’s a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex dimensions, though the global topology’s quite different. But I didn’t really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this” – he motioned at the surrounding, more-or-less-Euclidean space – “for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate, visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single, three-dimensional space. "

― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder

12 " All an organism could do from day to day was shore itself up in some rough semblance of its previous condition. The same was true, from moment to moment, for the state of the whole universe. By one means or another, everyone was an imperfect imitation "

― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder