Tillmann Ziegert > Tillmann's Quotes

“Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but refuse. They cling to the realm, or love, or the gods…illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is. But they’ll never know this. Not until it’s too late.”
― George R.R. Martin

“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“We remain part of the earth's ecosystem, and participate in the food chain whereby we kill and eat various plants and animals, while our bodies provide a fair field full of food for a great variety of parasites.”
― William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples

“It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Marital life cannot be easily represented in art because it is the
small, invisible, quotidian growth of the day-to-day, where
outwardly nothing happens. Romantic love is like a general
who knows how to conquer but not how to govern once the
last shot is fired. Unlike the aesthete, who knows how to 'kill
time' , married people master time without killing it. Marital
time is about the wise use and governance of time, setting
one's hands to the plough of the day-to-day.”
― John D. Caputo, How to Read Kierkegaard