Blindsight Quotes
"Try to touch the past. Try to deal with the past. It's not real. It's just a dream." — Ted Bundy
"Those few TwenCen relics who still believed in God also held that one shouldn't try to improve upon His handiwork."
"Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst."
"I hadn't seen much of Pag lately. I was pretty sure he'd been avoiding me."
"Even if he hadn't been my best friend, I should at least have empathized."
"But that part of me had been cut out along with the bad wiring."
"Back then I didn't so much think as observe, didn't deduce so much as remember."
"I remember wondering why I didn't take any satisfaction from that sound."
"Three decades it took, to see the irony in that remark."
"I actually did feel something then—faint, distant, but unmistakable. I felt angry."
"My mom and dad saved my life. I would have died."
"I think you did die," said my best and only friend.
"I may have grown up distant but I grew up objective, and I have Robert Paglino to thank for that."
"We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary."
"It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo's fire."
"I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center."
"All kinds of animals living here. Occasional demons too." — Ian Anderson, Catfish Rising
"Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them." — Robert Jarvik
"We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends." – Isaac
"Winner's the guy who makes the best guess on how it all comes out." – Isaac
"Cards still deal out with the same odds." – Isaac
"It's a big cold dangerous universe so most of them aren't going to make it, eh?" – Isaac
"You can win. Winner's the guy who makes the best guess on how it all comes out." – Isaac
"You can't make an informed guess without data, eh?" – Isaac
"No matter how good you are at poker when it comes to the deal, eh? Cards still deal out with the same odds." – Isaac
"Predators run for their dinner. Prey run for their lives." – Old Ecologist's Proverb
"You have eyes, but you do not see." – Jesus the Nazorean
"If you can see it, chances are it doesn't exist." – Kate Keogh, Grounds for Suicide
"There's a line from an early pop-dyn textbook, really old, maybe even TwenCen."
"We can already do anything we want to you. It's not like we need you to give us an excuse."
"It's an artefact of deep brain structure. Even congenitally blind people see them sometimes."
"Nothing touches you. Nothing grabs your leg."
"I could feel it when Michelle pissed in the suit. But I didn't notice anything else."
"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them."
"You're just doing your job. I know. But I don't like being played."
"It's vital to keep current. If you don't reconfigure you can't retrain. If you don’t retrain you're obsolete inside a month."
"Life isn't either/or. It's a matter of degree."
"Honeybees don't deliberately hide what they're saying. Honeybees don't develop whole new modes of communication configured specifically to confound observers. That's flexible, Robert. That's intelligent."
"If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness."
"Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat."
"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."
"You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man."
"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves."
"Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing."
"The only thing you couldn't do was admit it to yourself."
"Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels."
"You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing."
"Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness."
"Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information."
"How do you say We come in peace when the very words are an act of war?"
"It matters because it means we attacked them before Theseus launched. Before Firefall, even."
"If we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct? 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."
"Those nonhuman species with the most sophisticated language skills are a variety of birds and monkeys—not the great apes."
"If you squint, facts like these suggest that sentience might almost be a phase."
"Humans don't fit this pattern. We're outliers: that's one of the points I'm making."
"The unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind."
"At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it."
"The removal of half a brain doesn't seem to impact IQ or motor skills all that much."
"Language leads thought, and a single 'universal' scientific language would constrain the ways in which we view the world."