Quotes About Perception

Brain's got all kinds of gauges. You can know you're blind even when you're not; you can know you can see, even when you're blind. And yeah, you can know you don't exist even when you do. It's a long list, commissar. Cotard's, Anton's, Damascus disease. Just for starters.

You can be such a reptile sometimes," she said.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness.

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." —Emerson M. Pugh

I was just a tattletale for small minds back home.

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since they'd first thought to wonder at the heavens.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions.

TO HIMSELF EVERYONE IS IMMORTAL; HE MAY KNOW THAT HE IS GOING TO DIE, BUT HE CAN NEVER KNOW THAT HE IS DEAD. —

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies.

How do you know? Maybe you're just out of the loop, maybe those orthogonal stealthnets are running you the way you think you're running Rakshi. You think everyone on the planet's a puppet except for Colonel Jim Moore?

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.

How is an elephant like a schizophrenic?" "I – what?" "An elephant never forgets." He said nothing. "That's an AI joke," she said after a while.

The Colonel grunted. "In my experience, those things don't have to try to scare the shit out of anyone. If she wanted you dead or broken, you would be. Vampires have—idiomatic speech patterns. You may have simply misunderstood her." "She called me a cold cut.

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.

Half my age, and she's probably already forgotten the difference between the meat she was born with and the chrome that came after.

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

YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH, AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU MAD. —Aldous Huxley

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

And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.

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

She was attractive, but so was everyone in this kind of light; the longer the wavelength, the softer the focus. There's a reason fuckcubbies don't come with fluorescent lights.

So much more aware, so much less perceptive. An automaton could do better.