Schilds Ladder by
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- “I’m the quintessential singleton,” Cass replied. “I weigh up all my choices very carefully.”
- Every viewpoint was a compromise, but she had to be as close as she could get.
- What was the worst that one of these transient selves might do?
- endless varieties of suffering, endless varieties of stupidity, endless varieties of banality.
- If Rainzi’s eyes still seemed kind to her, after five years, wasn’t that because he’d shown her genuine kindness?
- This was not the time for paranoid delusions about the unknowable mind behind the mask.
- other self would wake, watch the whole event unfold in slow motion, bifurcate a million times, then vanish
- She would have to make do with whatever glimpses she could steal.
- she still had no hope of perceiving them as they perceived themselves.
- a translation interacting with a simulation
- Anything else was both futile and a kind of masochistic doublecounting
- what’s the simplest way to reconcile the contradictions?"
- She was perceiving the danger a billion times more clearly than she could ever have hoped to if she’d been embodied.
- Whoever first gains the power to impose their own view decides the issue? Isn’t that the definition of barbarism?
- an ancient principle known as Lorentz invariance, dating back to the abolition of the aether
- Kähler manifold
- I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible.
- Imagining that you need to float through every last abstract space that shows up in a physics problem is just being literal-minded.
- but spur-of-the-moment bickering in a confined space wasn’t his idea of productive disharmony.
- It would take a cosmic disaster even larger than Mimosa to rob him of more than a few minutes’ memories
- under the circumstances he was more than happy to let instincts predicated on absolute life and death come to the fore and do their best to protect him.
- Transcendence was a content-free word left over from religion
- It was probably an appealing notion if you were so lazy that you’d never actually learned anything about the universe you inhabited, and couldn’t quite conceive of putting in the effort to do so
- so long as they can keep the same algorithms ticking over
- Quickly! Give your Exoself this code.
- there was no point asking her for assurances; at best, that would only offend her, and at worst it might tempt her to act out his fears.
- This was the first thing he’d done since he’d joined her that wasn’t part of some complicated strategy to please her, or confound her.
- , he would probably have asked his Mediator to plead on his behalf for their attention.
- doing quantum mechanics with these arbitrary borders thrown in
- What creates the illusion of classical mechanics is our inability to keep track of every aspect of a quantum system
- They apply to systems that have not been rendered classical by decoherence
- How could I not be curious? It’s what flesh is famous for. However undeservedly
- You’ve mapped some stable mammalian neurobiology, and it’s not too pathological in its original form.
- pleasure for its own sake is a very uninteresting cul-de-sac
- Tchicaya struggled to think of a way to deflect the inquiry without piquing Yann’s curiosity further
- This is really what the anachronauts expected? No progress, no happiness, no success, no harmony? Just the worst excesses of their own sordid history, repeated over and over for millennia?
- She smiled. “I’m sorry, but that’s because you are.”
- Planck-scale biota
- vendekobiology
- we don’t know that these things are primeval , we just know that they seem to be ubiquitous
- In most multicellular creatures, all the cells in all the tissues share their full genome, with different parts of it switched on and off.
- How did you sweep our Augean stables clean?
- when the entire discussion was guaranteed to revolve around a mixture of procedural issues and mutual paranoia.
- Tchicaya hasn’t smeared himself in goat fat yet, so it’ll have to be me.
- Life does not arise easily in a universe of vacuum.
- He instructed his Exoself to calm his body; whatever sense of urgency he’d managed to convey by allowing his stress hormones free reign, the effect had either succeeded or failed by now
- spies would probably only share that knowledge with people who would not be swayed by it.
- Yeah, yeah. You’re a battered old creature, on the verge of slipping out of sentience into senility. But I think I can drag you back from the brink
- If you have scars, I’ll kiss them away
- Bodies like the Rindler ’s had plenty of neurons in reserve, since the precise delegation of tasks between the digital components and the central nervous system varied widely from culture to culture.
- This was the first time in his life that he’d begun a conversation with a stranger without the ground being prepared in advance, without two Mediators conspiring to bridge the gap.
- You’ll outlive the stars, if you want to.
- If you live long enough, you get to compromise on everything
- I don’t want to start pretending that I’m inhabiting your body. Since I can’t actually control it, that would just make me feel trapped
- As local deaths went, he’d had worse.
- We’re not in the near side anymore. Coherence is nowhere near as fragile here.
- We reach out and swallow the problem; we internalize it completely. Then we can bludgeon our way through by trial and error, without the world ever seeing a single mistake.
- Then it would release the resulting superposition into the depths of the far side, and wait for the reply that would enable it to erase all its failures.
- from the inside, each part of the state vector that described your mind experiencing something definite simply had that one, definite experience.
- Sweeping principles of homogeneity were wishful thining here.
- the excitement of the changes that had percolated up from nowhere.
- the excitement of the changes that had percolated up from nowhere.
- All they could do now was keep on climbing Schild’s ladder.
- when you eat for the sake of eating, you’re infecting yourself.
- All food works like yogurt
- Humans had been nothing but a colony of specialized cells
- The less catharsis I can get these days, the better.
- Students will curse our names. What more can anyone hope for?
- We don’t even know the difference between their communications signals and their waste products
- Decoherence and the Appearance of a Classical World in Quantum Theory