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21 " Eschatology, "
― Neal Stephenson , Fall or, Dodge in Hell
22 " Stand-up peeing in a long flowing garment could lead to various mishaps. "
23 " Its title was “Virtual-Space Cartography from Manifold-Based Traffic Analysis. "
24 " Did the ants feeding on a puddle of spilled soda experience its sweetness? Or were they too simple for that and only responding programmatically? The infrared sensor on an elevator door did not experience qualia of people stepping through its beam; it was just a dumb switch. Where on the evolutionary ladder did the brain stop being a glorified elevator door sensor and begin to experience qualia? Before or after ants? Or was it the case that an individual ant was too simple to experience qualia but a whole swarm of them collectively did? "
25 " Their fathers believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to want to come and take their guns and other property. So they put money they didn’t really have into stockpiling trillions of rounds and hunkered down waiting for the elites to come confiscate their stuff. There’s no use for any of it. So they come here sometimes and ‘vote with bullets. "
26 " I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And "
27 " the result of her having filled out a form, years ago, when she’d joined Lyke, and having clicked the “submit” button. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty strange bit of semantics "
28 " All fine and simple in principle. The details very complicated, of course. "
29 " But like a lot of theologies it can do duty as a cracked mirror or a smudged lens through which we might be able to glimpse things that are informative. "
30 " She didn’t really know the speech of Beedles and so she made it as simple as she could: “I am Death,” she said. “Now, which one of us is going to open the gate? "
31 " All of the history had been erased in Karen’s earnest efforts to make the house historical. "
32 " in an unguarded moment. "
33 " What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?” Enoch asked. "
34 " He was a tiny guy, deeply embedded in a leather chair, like a mouse in a baseball mitt. "
35 " Within seconds he was reading the IMDb profile of this actress, a veteran of numerous television commercials and a few indie films. "
36 " that he lived in a universe whose complexity defied algorithmic simulation. "
37 " Humans were biology. They lived for the dopamine rush. They could get it either by putting the relevant chemicals directly into their bodies or by partaking of some clickbait that had been algorithmically perfected to make brains generate the dopamine through psychological alchemy. "
38 " The big red-handled blade switch on the wall of the mad-scientist lab. "
39 " The opening strains of “Comfortably Numb. "
40 " Obnubilated,” according to Enoch Root—a word that had forced everyone to go to their dictionaries. It meant “hidden under clouds. "