Aidan McDonald

“Adam, we can’t make being safe the guiding principle of our lives. We have to be who we are—we can only do what we do, sweetie.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift

“Taking spooky free will off the table means we can also put to rest a persistent but misguided concern about whether or not determinism is true. In physics and in philosophy, determinism is the proposal that all events in the universe are completely determined by previously existing physical causes. The alternative to determinism is that chance is built into the universe from the ground up, whether through fluctuations in a quantum soup or through some other as yet unknown principles of physics. Whether determinism matters for free will has been the topic of endless debate. My former boss Gerald Edelman summed it up well with a provocative one-liner: Free will – whatever you think about it, we’re determined to have it.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

“The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Okay,” I said. There are these moments when you see the course of your life unfolding, and you feel powerless to alter it.”
― John Irving, The Last Chairlift