Lionel

“Reflection is a dangerous pastime. It can lead you to rewrite your past, alter how you see your present, and tempt you down paths you never imagined you would explore.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space

“Design is applied ethics. Sometimes this connection is obvious: if you design razor wire, you’re saying that anyone who tries to contravene someone else’s right to private property should be injured. But whatever the medium or material, every act of design is a statement about the future.”
― Cennydd Bowles, Future Ethics

“you don’t get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, The Gervais Principle: The Complete Series, with a Bonus Essay on Office Space

“I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware."

Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.

With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.

I know how they make up my thoughts.

These thoughts.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others