But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The b….

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black..

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the ro….

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams..

We are not thinking machines..

Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to blood….

Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it..

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows en….

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail..

People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think..

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irr….

I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain..

What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?.

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?.

It’s not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion..

Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise he….

If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its metapho….

The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest..

I really wanted to talk to her. I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit..

There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that mat….

Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz..