Karl Schroeder kanadai

„It's not that simple.”
„Ah! That phrase is Male for `I'm afraid to'.”

Chapter 40

“We’re doing something humans used to do thousands of years ago. It’s called science. You’ve probably never heard of it.”

Chapter 4

"Immortality and death are equally terrible.”

Chapter 12

“You misunderstand the nature of scholarship, Mr. Tarvey, if you believe it to be something that ceases when the paychecks stop. It is not possible for me to be unemployed, although it is possible for me to not be paid for what I do.”

Chapter 7

“The oaks are one of the most powerful species in the arena. They’re aggressive, relentless, generally hostile to animalia…” He saw Fanning’s look, and smiled. “Look at the legs. Look at the sensing nets, the power units. This oak is a tree wedded to an artificial intelligence with mobility, weapons, dexterous arms, and an internal Edisonian engine for designing whatever it may need.”
The admiral was still shaking his head. “But all a tree needs is—”
“Air, soil, sunlight, and peace and quiet, yes. And if you deprive this fellow of any of those things, he’ll hunt you down and obliterate you.”
“But … but why? I mean, why should the artificial mind care? I can see what it has to offer the tree. But what does the tree offer it?”
“Something no AI has by itself,” said Keir. “A four-billion-year-old will to live.”

Chapter 18

„To read is to make love to the world. But to make love to a woman is to feel like the world is reading you.”

Chapter 19

„To be conscious is fine for a human; you're self-created individuals. You have no trouble with your sense of Self. Your identity is four billion years old, it's rooted in your genes. You can no more have a real crisis of identity than a fish can become allergic to water.
But us! We come into being knowing that we are made. The Government tells me I have free will, but I know that every decision I make comes from the personality template I made to hide from the Winds. It could easily be different. I could be different, were I not now locked into this pattern. And the pattern, everything I am, is an imitation. Even my emotions,” she said bitterly, „are really Calandria's, expressed by the mechanisms I made to imitate her. I'm not really me, you see. There's no way I can see to become… me.”

Chapter 37

“Every man’s entitled to his own opinion. But not his own facts.”

Chapter 2

This idea, Cadille had written, stems from my perception that several centuries of scientific endeavor have shown that we attempt to use science to impose our own image on the world. The ultimate motivation for science is mastery of Nature, when investigation proceeds as an interrogation. Our investigations also bear our cultural biases – the classic example being Darwin's theories having been influenced by the unbridled capitalism of England in his day. Finally and most damning is the fact that this investigation is entirely one-sided: we make up stories about how Nature truly is. Nature itself is silent on the subject.

Chapter 36

Hayden Griffin was plucking a fish when the gravity bell rang.

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