Evan Hockings

“What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.”
― Eugene T. Gendlin, Focusing

“Think of a deer skipping gracefully across a complex woodland terrain. Then think of a mathematician in an analogous situation, attempting to traverse a field of abstract algebra—stiff and achy; unnatural; almost entirely blind, able to see scarcely two yards ahead; slow and unsteady; frowning with concentration; clutching the rollator of formal proof… Maybe that happens to be the only way we can currently do it, rather than the way it really should be done.

In all of this, there is room for improvement.”
― Nick Bostrom, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World

“To ask in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable. We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence.”
― John von Neumann

“To help my all-too-human senses and brain, they translate the problem into yosegi: opening a Japanese trick box. The quantum protocols are sensations, imperfections and valleys in the marquetry, pressure points inside the wood like tense muscles, faint grins of sliding sections. I need to find the right sequence that opens it.

Except that here, the trick is not opening it too early, the wood patterns are hidden in the countless qubits inside – each zero and one at the same time – and the moves are quantum logic operations, executed by the arrays of lasers and interferometers the gogols have built in the ship’s wings. It all amounts to what the ancients called quantum process tomography: trying to figure out what the Box does to the probe states we ease into it, gently, like lockpicks. It feels like trying to juggle eight-side Rubik’s cubes while trying to solve them at the same time.”
― Hannu Rajaniemi, The Fractal Prince