Quotes from Greg Egan

If there was one remaining purpose to my life, though, this was it: to prove that the truth could always be faced – explained, demystified, accepted.

Let me understand you. Let me piece you together, hold you together. Let me help you to explain yourself.

A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its "surroundings" in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. "Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition.

Parantham finally realized that selecting a star on the map enabled a sub-menu with the unassuming option "Go to star". Choosing this did not change the map's viewpoint or magnification; rather, it caused the map to inquire politely, "Are you sure you wish to travel to this star?

A recent survey of 2,000 male graduates of Harvard Business School found that penis length & IQ were equally good predictors of annual income. -- from "Eugene

The Transmuters had built a structure that dwarfed universes, but touched each one only lightly. They hadn't turned whole worlds to rubble, they hadn't reshaped galaxies in their image. Having evolved on some distant, finite world, they'd inherited the most valuable survival trait of all. Restraint.

I was matter, like everything else. I could feel the slow decay of my body, the absolute certainty of death. Every heartbeat spelt out a new proof of mortality. Every moment was a premature burial.

A citizen who spiralled down into insanity could spend teratau in a state of confusion and pain, with a mind too damaged to authorise help, or even to choose extinction. That was the price of autonomy: an inalienable right to madness and suffering, inseparable from the right to solitude and peace.

There was still hope. I still had a chance to resurrect myself. I'd just have to do it consciously, every step of the way.

He'd never been lectured on Darwinism in any brothel back home, but then what could he expect in a country run by godless socialists?

We have a special name, here, for a certain kind of failure to defer to the greater good—for putting a personal sense of doing right above any objective measure of the outcome. It's called 'moral vanity'.

We've been half right about a lot of things, but there's something missing from our theories, something whose nature we haven't even guessed yet. If we don't learn to understand it, it will kill us.

Imagine a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what's left? A cloud of random numbers.

Aden would phone before he left, trying to patch things up, but she could see how easy it would be, now, to break things off permanently. And now that it had reached that stage, it seemed like the obvious thing to do. She wasn't upset, or relieved – just calm. It always made her feel that way: burning bridges, driving people away. Simplifying her life. She'd

It was like listening to two badly written computer programs trying to convince each other that they were sentient.

We learn precisely enough to keep us from wanting to know any more

It was a rigorous result in information theory that once you could learn in a sufficiently flexible manner – something humanity had achieved in the Bronze Age – the only limits you faced were speed and storage; any other structural changes were just a matter of style.

Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.

The environment was full of birds and insects, rodents and small reptiles - decorative in appearance, but also satisfying a more abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone observer; anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of view-points. Ontological guy lines.

I hope you theorists know what you're doing.' 'I can assure you that we don't. The geometry is still beyond us. All I learnt in the void was that our best guess so far is certainly wrong.

Conquering the Galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

As he walked past shops and teahouses he could still

Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition.

When first resurrected, he'd worried constantly over which aspects of his past he should imitate for the sake of sanity, and which he should discard as a matter of honesty.