It’s kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.

Nature, though. Nature always welcomed him. She passed no judgements, didn’t care about right or wrong, guilt or innocence.

At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there’s gonna be wine in the mix at some point.

Imagine you are Siri Keeton:You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing...

Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.

I don’t understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.

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 hexagon? It doesn’t. It’s programmed to chew up...

It’s really kind of… well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know ‘em. We’re all beautiful.

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

Transcendence is transformation.

The neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness.

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

I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people’s opinions.

She was attractive, but so was everyone in this kind of light; the longer the wavelength, the softer the focus. There’s a reason fuckcubbies don’t come with fluorescent lights.

Everyone’s running from something.

Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality.

Maybe your empathy’s just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you’re only feeling yourself, maybe you’re even worst than me. Or maybe...

Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.I explored it...

Everything’s an act. Everything’s strategy.

Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.

Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.

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 matters is whether it beats the alternative.

So much anger in here. So much hate. So much to take out on someone. This time it’s going to count. She’s adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land....

It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was...

Technology implies belligerence.

I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for...

Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable.

But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.

What’s the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?

Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of...

After four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.

The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh...

You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

Perhaps they’d been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment’s notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out...

I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms.” There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. “But I do only what you force me to....

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I’m Human again.

Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common...

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life meunderstand 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 rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear...

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 brain stem does its best.

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

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal...

Everyone’s got intimacy issues these days, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He must have; the population had been dropping for decades.

You can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.

The vampires win every time.

My genes done gone and tricked my brainBy making fucking feel so greatThat’s how the little creeps attainTheir plan to fuckin’ replicateBut brain’s got tricks itself, you seeTo get the bang but not the biteI...