Status Updates From Exhalation

6. The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

"Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments... even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities."

5. Dacey's patent Automatic Nanny

"You misunderstand me... my efforts to confirm his thesis would have been a testament to his influence, no matter what my results. But because I am Reginald Dacey’s son, I have disproved his thesis twice over, because my entire life has been a demonstration of the impact a father’s attention can have on his son."

One of my least favorites, like, I got the point, but it was boring

4. The lifecycle of Software Objects

"She initiates the game's shutdown procedure and calls Jax on the intercom. -Playtime's over Jax- she says. -Time to do your homework-"

I feel that this story could be told in a fewer pages. Either way it was good, they started as simple "apps" and ended up as humans... my god.

3. What's expected of us

"It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know that they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief... Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has."

This one blew my mind. Does free will actually exist?

2. Exhalation

"I said that air is not the source of life. Air can neither be created nor destroyed; the total amount of air in the universe remains constant, and if air were all that we needed to live, we would never die"

"Will it be preferable to remain mute to prolong our ability to think, or to talk until the very end? I don’t know"

I am amazed at how a story can be made from a concept as "simple" as exhalation

'The universe is so vast that intelligent life must surely have arisen many times. The univers is also so old that even one technological species would have had time to expand and fill the galaxy. Yet there is no sign of life anywhere except on Earth. Humans call this the Fermi Paradox.'

'We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated.'

'People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.'

'Regarding the role of truth in autobiography, the critic Roy Pascal wrote, "On the one side are the truths of fact, on the other the truth of the writer's feeling, and where the two coincide cannot be decided by any outside authority in advance." '

'Millions of people [...] have been keeping lifelogs for years, wearing personal cams that capture continuous video of their entire lives. People consult their lifelogs for a variety of reasons—everything from reliving favorite moments to tracking down the cause of allergic reactions—but only intermittently; no one wants to dpend all their time formulating queries and sifting through the results.'

'It's indicative of the Victorian attitude toward children that at no point does Dacey suggest that children should be raised by their parents.'

["Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny"]