Quotes About Perception

Dan, you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You're already a different person than you were ten minutes ago.

no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. There have always been those tasked with the rotation of informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had little to do with increasing its clarity.

Plus it'll triple your assimilation rate over anything filtered through the senses. Perfect for porn.

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.

I mean, Mom would never admit it in a million years but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it's a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It's noble, it's maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. It's limiting. Maybe whatever's out here doesn't even use it.

Floaters swarmed through his eyeballs like schools of panicked fish.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

Not blind chance. Blindsight. Amanda? Respond, please." "Blindsight?" "Nothing wrong with the receptors," he said distractedly. "Brain processes the image but it can't access it. Brain stem takes over." "Your brain stem can see but you can't?

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.

THE HUMAN BRAIN WERE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULD UNDERSTAND IT, WE WOULD BE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULDN'T. —Emerson M. Pugh

That's like a chimp asking why those hairless apes aren't slinging bigger feces than everyone else, if they're so damned clever.

Comforting lies get far too easy with practice.

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.

You're the first person I've seen here who's actually dressed like a monk." "It's a bathrobe.

I could be the only sentient being in the universe. If I'm even that much. Because I don't know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator.

REALITY IS THAT WHICH, WHEN YOU STOP BELIEVING IN IT, DOESN'T GO AWAY. —PHILIP K. DICK

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. Even

If you've got the senses and reflexes to hide between someone's saccades, why stop there? Why not do something that really works?

I HAVE NEVER FOR ONE INSTANT SEEN CLEARLY WITHIN MYSELF. HOW THEN WOULD YOU HAVE ME JUDGE THE DEEDS OF OTHERS? —MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

hyperbolic discounting, and

TRY TO TOUCH THE PAST. TRY TO DEAL WITH THE PAST. IT'S NOT REAL. IT'S JUST A DREAM. —Ted Bundy