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76,044 books
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282,512 voters
John Sebastian
https://www.goodreads.com/johng0305
1984
by
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.
“They would certainly have been simpler than the earliest known microbial mats, but somewhere in your genome there will be sequences of DNA that have been faithfully passed down across the great sweep of geological time, and if you have children, you’ll pass these four-billion-year-old messages on to them.”
― Human Universe
― Human Universe
“Our existence is a ridiculous affront to common sense, beyond any reasonable expectation of the possible based on the simplicity of the laws of nature, and our civilisation is the combination of seven billion individual affronts. This is what my smiling seems to say: Man certainly does delight me. Our existence is necessarily temporary and our spatial reach finite, and this makes us all the more precious. Mahler’s great farewell to life can also be read as a call to value life with all your heart, to use it wisely and to enjoy it while you can.”
― Human Universe
― Human Universe
“ideas are the lifeblood of civilisation, and societies assimilate ideas and become comfortable with their implications through understanding and debate. If eternal inflation is the correct description of our universe, it will be the artists, philosophers, theologians, novelists and musicians, alongside the physicists, who explore its meaning. What does it mean if the existence of our universe is inevitable? What does it mean if we are not special in any way? What does it mean if our observable universe, with all its myriad galaxies and possibilities, is a vanishingly small leaf on an every-expanding fractal tree of universes? What does it mean if you are, because you have to be? I can’t tell you. I can only ask – what does it mean to you?”
― Human Universe
― Human Universe
“Occam’s razor is an important tool in science. It shouldn’t be oversold; nature can be complex and bizarre. But as a rule of thumb, it is most sensible to adopt the simplest explanation for an observation until the evidence overwhelms it.”
― Human Universe
― Human Universe
“I held a brain for the cameras at St Paul’s teaching hospital in Addis. It is the most complex single object in the known universe, a most intricate example of emergent complexity assembled over 4 billion years by natural selection operating within the constraints placed upon it by the laws of physics and the particular biochemistry of life on Earth. It contains around 85 billion individual neurons, which is of the same order as the number of stars in an average galaxy. But that doesn’t begin to describe its complexity. Each neuron is thought to make between 10,000 and 100,000 connections to other neurons, making the brain a computer way beyond anything our current technology can simulate. When we do manage to simulate one, I have no doubt that sentience will emerge; consciousness is not magic, it is an emergent property consistent with the known laws of nature.”
― Human Universe
― Human Universe
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