Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life.  That is its job.  Your job is to notice.


Michael Harris, as quoted by The Economist (August 16, 2014)

Mammalian minds evolved to track external dangers and opportunities.... Only humans acquired an ability to focus solely on internal thoughts.... [But] people go to surprisingly great lengths to avoid being stranded with their own thoughts.

Science News, People Find Solitude Distressing

Consciousness was indeed real.  It had observable energy.  That energy translated into movement, into work.  That energy ordered information, the stuff of the world, the matter, and recycled that order back into itself, lifting itself to ever higher ground.

Kathleen Ann Goonan, Light Music 

Consciousness was firmly embedded in the fabric of space and time, a material part of its vibrational energy.  Consciousness, or mind, was not split off from matter, hovering outside it.... Instead, consciousness was within matter, of matter.  It was matter looking at itself and being astonished.  It was the point seeing the wave, or the wave seeing the point.  Consciousness was quantum electrodynamism.  Time turned back upon itself.  Time splintering.  Time strutting loose among the energy levels, only slightly stilled, slightly caught, in that glance called consciousness, the observer, the energy that made it into this and not-this, live cat and dead cat.

Kathleen Ann Goonan, Light Music

Relationships were ... utterly mysterious, they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

To exist is to have identity; to have identity means one is what one is and one is not what one is not; which means, to have causes and consequences, pain and pleasure, experience and cessation. To exist means to exist within a context. To be defined. To be finite….

Life was matter imbued with meaning; matter aware of itself, and, because of that awareness, aware that it was more than mere matter…aware of the universe…of its identity, its finitude.

John C. Wright, The Golden Transcendence