Sydney’s Reviews > Exhalation > Status Update

“Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so”

Free will - Bartleby

“They’re blind to the simple truth: complex minds can’t develop on their own… minds don’t grow the way weeds do, flourishing under indifferent attention… for a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds.”

“The bigger problem is that Jax doesn’t want to control an avatar remotely: he wants to BE the avatar. For him, the keyboard and screen are a miserable substitute for being there…”

“They want something that responds like a person, but isn’t owed the same obligations as a person…”

“She wants to tell them that Blue Gamma was more right than it knew: experience isn't merely the best teacher; it's the only teacher. If she's learned anything raising Jax, it's that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can't assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.”

“… he was now able to identify the words when people spoke in an ordinary conversation. The sounds that came from a person’s mouth hadn’t changed, but he understood them differently; he was aware of the pieces from which the whole was made. He himself had been speaking in words all along. He just hadn’t known it until now.”

“In most cases we have to forget a little bit before we can forgive; when we no longer experience the pain as fresh, the insult is easier to forgive, which in turn makes it less memorable, and so on. It’s this psychological feedback loop that makes initially infuriating offenses seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight.”

“‘It’s the same story, but you’ve changed the way you tell it.’… For a moment Kokwa stared at him, and then he laughed. ‘Is this what you think is important, now that you’ve learned the art of writing?’
…
Afterward, Jijingi remembered the proverb Moseby had mentioned. Even though Kokwa was telling the same story, he might arrange the words differently each time he told it; he was skilled enough as a storyteller that the arrangement of words didn’t matter. It was different for Moseby, who never acted anything out when he gave his sermons; for him, the words were what was important. Jijingi realized that Moseby wrote down his sermons not because his memory was terrible but because he was looking for a specific arrangement of words.”

“I also wonder if… subconsciously , we regarded our episodic memories (recollection of personal experience) as such an integral part of our identities that we were reluctant to externalize them, to relegate them to books on a shelf or files on a computer.”

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

“It’s no coincidence that ‘aspiration’ means both hope and the act of breathing. When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.”

“Science is not just the search for the truth, he said. It’s the search for purpose.”

“I want to know whether my decisions matter!”

“Each time you do something generous, you’re shaping yourself into someone who’s more likely to be generous next time, and that matters.”

“If we sat that an individual’s character is revealed by the choices they make over time, then, in a similar fashion, an individual’s character would also be revealed by the choices they make across many worlds.”