There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.
“Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us—not anymore. We humans, alone among the earth’s organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception. We are aware of the many species of information. We name their types sardonically, as though to reassure ourselves that we understand: urban myths and zombie lies. We keep them alive in air-conditioned server farms. But we cannot own them. When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?”
― The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
― The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
“And where did logic belong? To psychology or to computer science? Surely not just to philosophy.”
― The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
― The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
“When we suffer we think that the other person has caused our suffering. “She doesn’t love me. So why do I have to love her?” Our natural tendency is to want to punish the other person. And the way we do that is to show her that “I can survive very well without you.” This is an indirect way of saying: “I don’t need you.” But that’s not true love. Many of us have made that mistake. I also have made that mistake. But we learn. In fact, when we suffer we do need the other person. That’s the commitment we made in the beginning of our relationship.”
― No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering
― No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering
“The demon replaces chance with purpose. It uses information to reduce entropy.”
― The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
― The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
“Promises take many shapes, and the more… momentous they are, the more they might look like threats. All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some aspect of our lives, and we all suddenly become conservative, even though we want and need what the promise holds, and look forward to the promised change at the same time.”
― The Hydrogen Sonata
― The Hydrogen Sonata
The American West
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