The Quote thread
Started by: Boltz | Replies: 43 | Views: 4,362
Lamitrov2Posts: 2,533
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View Profile "I see now that the Circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are."
- Mewtwo
HewittPosts: 14,256
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View Profile "Get the fuck off that weird stick figure site."
- Mom
Obviously, DarkDemon is a hex upon this earth
Person McPersonPosts: 2,335
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View Profile "i want to be the reason you look down at your phone and smile.
and walk into an pole"
Hell yeah. Nice quote.
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View Profile Boltz2Posts: 725
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View Profile "I dont look back Darling, it distracts me from Now" -Edna from Incredibles.
Also "NO CAPES"
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View Profile "if a fish was judged on how good he can climb a tree, he would be considered stupid his whole life"- Dr.Seus
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View Profile "Isn't it weird how nobody knows what Obama's last name is?" -Charrys thick-as-pig-shit friend.
DevourAdministrator1Posts: 9,916
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View Profile Is this just for short quotes? This is about if human consciousness was a fluke, and how a brilliant but non-conscious and purely Darwinian alien species might react when reading the signals we broadcast into space. It's from a book I loved:
Imagine you're an alien.
Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing.
You can't imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn't even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can't quite put your finger on.
Try.
Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you'll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others.
You decode the signals, and stumble:
"I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome—"
"To fully appreciate Kesey's Quartet—"
"They hate us for our freedom—"
"Pay attention, now—"
"Understand."
There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance.
The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.
Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.
The signal is an attack.
And it's coming from right about there.
*
"Now you get it," Sascha said.
I shook my head, trying to wrap it around that insane, impossible conclusion. "They're not even hostile." Not even capable of hostility. Just so profoundly alien that they couldn't help but treat human language itself as a form of combat.
How do you say We come in peace when the very words are an act of war?
Because if Sarasti was right, these aliens were the norm: evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we—we were the flukes and the fossils. We were the flightless birds lauding our own mastery over some remote island while serpents and carnivores washed up on our shores.
If Sarasti was right, there was no hope of reconciliation.
A memory rose into my mind and stuck there: a man in motion, head bent, mouth twisted into an unrelenting grimace. His eyes focused on one foot, then the other. His legs moved stiffly, carefully. His arms moved not at all. He lurched like a zombie in thrall to rigor mortis.
I knew what it was. Proprioreceptive polyneuropathy, a case study I'd encountered in ConSensus back before Szpindel had died. Only self-awareness remained. Deprived of the unconscious sense and subroutines he had always taken for granted, he'd had to focus on each and every step across the room. His body no longer knew where its limbs were or what they were doing. To move at all, to even remain upright, he had to bear constant witness.
I swore I could feel Sarasti at my shoulder, peering into my memories. I swore I heard him speak in my mind like a schizophrenic hallucination:
This is the best that consciousness can do, when left on its own Person McPersonPosts: 2,335
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GMR2Posts: 3,411
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View Profile "Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides. - Laozi
"Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted. ~ Matthew 23:12
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Mark XD2Posts: 4,577
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View Profile honestly, i think some of these quotes need some cnc, some are just radical nonsense
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View Profile "I'm not a fanatic of Milos Jojic, even though i have all of his kits from FK Partizan, but that does not make a partizan fan, i'm pure delije, retard!"
-This cunt in my school named Nemanja, what a prick
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