Quotes About Perspective

Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort.

Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view's distorted.

Let's just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.

All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way.

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.

PROBLEMS CANNOT BE SOLVED AT THE SAME LEVEL OF AWARENESS THAT CREATED THEM. –ALBERT EINSTEIN

What do you think vision is?" she asked him. "You don't see a fraction of the things that surround you, and at least half the things you do see are deceptive. Hell, color doesn't even exist outside your own head. Vision's just plain wrong; it only persists because it works. If you're going to dismiss the idea of God, you better stop believing your own eyes in the bargain.

A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.

Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system. I

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half asses way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on try. We focus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back

people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You

Sometimes when you see too much, you miss a lot.

And she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from the nearest sunlight, that it's only dark when the lights are on.

Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions

people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy.

we're hard-core realists—we just pay lip service to death and decay and keep right on feeling immortal anyway.

Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding.

If there's one thing I'm the world's greatest expert on, it's how it feels to be me. And

never humanize your victims. It shouldn't have been such an issue when dealing with methane-breathing medusae.

Like to hear a vampire folk tale?" Sarasti asked. "Vampires have folk tales?" He took it for a yes. "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.

when a lemur makes a human, it doesn't matter how many lemur chains and lemur rules and lemur constraints she imposes. She's simply, computationally incapable of seeing all the angles that her smarter creation can take in at a glance.

He may have been wrong. I may have been. But that, that distance—that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind—it's not entirely a bad thing.

once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.

Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worse than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.