The universe is a giant quantum-mechanical relativistic Rube-Goldberg patchwork construct, knit by interactions of its constituents, changed and ever changing through these interactions.

Vandana Singh, Ambiguity Machines and other stories

All women ... were calculating—even if their calculations took place somewhere south of their conscious awareness. All women weighed and measured; did not always listen to the results rationally, but made efforts in that direction that most men I knew could not duplicate or understand. 

Greg Bear,  Legacy

If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be? Even if we could keep the machines in a subservient position, for instance by turning off the power at strategic moments, we should, as a species, feel greatly humbled. … This new danger … if it comes at all … is remote but not astronomically remote, and is certainly something which can give us anxiety. It is customary, in a talk or article on this subject, to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some particularly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine. It might for instance be said that no machine could write good English, or that it could not be influenced by sex-appeal or smoke a pipe. I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set.

Alan Turing, quoted by Sebastian Sunday Grève in AI’s first philosopher:  https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-should-remember-alan-turing-as-a-philosopher

Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad.

Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

Humans were one lucky tribe of apes with just enough intelligence and creativity to build a badly functioning civilization.  And being only barely competent, there was no reason to believe that humanity's greatest achievements amounted to anything more than the average anthill lost on the infinitely intriguing savanna.

Robert Reed, "Integral Nothings" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February, 2021)

Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless.  There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.

H.G.Wells, The Time Machine

One should never mistake pattern for meaning. 

Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

It rarely paid to frighten people but it never paid to confuse them.

Lifted & spun a bit from Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

We are what we do, not what we think.  Only the interactions count.

Iain Banks, The Player of Games

We're an information economy.... it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.  Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified...

William Gibson,  Johnny Mnemonic

Now is now!  There is never more to experience than this single "now", which recurs at an interval exactly one second in length.

Jack Vance, Tales of the Dying Earth


 See also:   http://everythingrum.blogspot.com/2013/09/moments-in-time-and-consciousness.html

Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.  The greater the slowing of time, the stronger gravity's pull....  At the surface of a black hole, time is slowed to a halt.

Kip Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

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