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657 books
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439 voters
Ksipe
https://www.goodreads.com/xito
“People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.”
― Blindsight
― Blindsight
“Wasn't that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare, 'My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief. Suck it.”
― Dreams of Gods & Monsters
― Dreams of Gods & Monsters
“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”
― Blindsight
― Blindsight
“Depression is easy to wallow in and hard to fight against, but if you just give in to it completely it's a downward spiral. You skip going to class because you're feeling depressed, then you stay in the rest of the day because you've already missed one class, then you skip the next class because you already missed the first one, and you stop answering your phone because people are asking whether you're okay and you don't want to talk to them, and it just gets worse from there. That spiral doesn't have to happen, and thinking in the right ways even though you're depressed is one of the big things that halts it.”
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“While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. "Blindsight" is a thought experiment, a game of "Just suppose" and "What if". Nothing more.
On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superioirity, a thousand years ago: "if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct?" Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.”
― Blindsight
On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superioirity, a thousand years ago: "if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct?" Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.”
― Blindsight
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Ksipe’s 2025 Year in Books
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