Cryonics and quotesfiles

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Jul 10 2002 - 13:36:30 MDT


Some items from my own quotes file (currently not available on the Net
as yet):

"Our brains live in a dark, quiet, wet place. That is the reality. It
is only by means of our senses that we get the illusion of being out
there in the world. In a way, our bodies are a form of telepresence,
operated by our brains, huddling safe in their little caves of bone."
        -- Hal Finney

"'Man has Nature whacked,' said someone to a friend of mine not long
ago. In their context the words had a certain tragic beauty, for the
speaker was dying of tuberculosis. 'No matter,' he said, 'I know I'm
one of the casualties. Of course there are casualties on the winning as
well as on the losing side. But that doesn't alter the fact that it is
winning.'"
        -- C.S. Lewis, "The Abolition of Man", p. 53.

"Don't judge me so harshly, Mr. Sable. If there is a God, then He has
passed a death sentence on every human being from the moment of
conception. I am but a talented amateur."
        -- Conrad Bland
        - Michael Resnick, "Walpurgisnacht", p. 140.

"'Ethical consideration' has come to mean reasoning from an ivory tower
about abstract non-issues while people die."
        -- Zeb Haradon

"Now Charlie, don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got
everything he wished for." "What?" "He lived happily ever after."
        -- Roald Dahl, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"

"I don't need The Media to tell me that I should be outraged about a
brutal murder. All I need is to be informed that it has happened, and
I'll form my own opinion about it."
        -- The_Morlock, montoyara@h o t m a i l.com
        - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00%2F02%2F21%2F1125208

"The senator described to me her vision of society. We're on a train,
she said. A runaway train steaming furiously toward a collision with a
concrete wall and all she wanted to do was to put on the brakes before
it was too late. I say it's already too late. I say if we want to
survive, forget about the brakes and stoke the boilers. Let's get up
enough speed now so that no lousy wall of concrete can dictate our doom.
Enough speed to thrust this train right through the wall. We all know
that a straw, driven by a tornado, can pierce a fence post. We have to
ride that tornado. We have to ride that train. We have to find out if
there is life on the other side of the wall, because if we give up now
we are going to crash. Only audacity and nerve can serve us now."
        -- Linda Nagata, "Tech Heaven"

"On a grand scale we simply want to save the world, so obviously we're
just letting ourselves in for a lot of disappointment and we're doomed
to failure since we didn't pick some cheap-ass two-bit goal like
collecting all the Garbage Pail Kids cards."
        -- http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/rants/X0044_Subject_Nenslo.html

"But I am not an object. I am not a noun, I am an adjective. I am the
way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K Clark-ish way. At
the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that
way; someday that could change."
        -- John K Clark (johnkc@well.com)

"Waiting for the bus is a bad idea if you turn out to be the bus driver."
        -- Michael M. Butler (butler@comp*lib.org)

"Quantum cosmology impinges on supposedly religious issues - but that
makes those issues scientific issues; it doesn't transform the science
into mysticism."
        -- Greg Egan
        - http://www.midnight.com.au/eidolon/issue_11/11_egan.htm

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence


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