“Thinking, I thought, was at the core of the problem. What problem? All problems” (54). “The book’s premise was that we live in two worlds: an actual physical world and an intangible, invisible world of thought. These two worlds are constantly interacting with one another: Thoughts color and influence the way we perceive and react… Continue reading

“It opened with that northern brass band music which sounds like it marched to its own funeral more than a century ago, music whose every note is a lamentation for its having become extinct” (76). “Except extinction no longer means ‘no longer in existence’. Plenty of extinct things are still around. Brass bands, for example:… Continue reading

“The result confirmed the central contention in Gödel, Escher, Bach. Human intuition was not so magical after all. A machine could reproduce it with the trick of mapping one thing onto another” (147). “AI experts had long recognized that tasks that humans perform instantly and unthinkingly, such as recognizing an image, are hard to program,… Continue reading

“I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert,… Continue reading

“these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand” (20). “kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck–rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed” (20).… Continue reading