We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.
Eddie said, “What is this, a salamander convention?
The meaning of these discoveries has not yet been sorted out, but it is certainly now impossible to regard the prehistoric Europeans as savages idly.
I am most heartily glad that I am not going to the dangerous and uncertain Black Hills.
How many raptors are there?” she said. “I couldn’t tell for sure, when I saw them. I thought nine.” “I think there’s more,” Malcolm said. “I think eleven or twelve in all.” “Twelve?” she said, glancing up at him. “On this little island?” “Yes.
Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs.’ The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all.
In the modern world, it’s a much more serious transgression to shoot a tiger than to shoot your parents. Tigers have advocates.
Welcome to Westworld, where nothing can go wrong... go wrong... go wrong.
A characteristic of all crises is their predictability, in retrospect. They seem to have a certain inevitability, they seem predestined.
Each parasaur produced a large mound of straw-colored spoor. This was accompanied by low trumpeting from each animal in the herd – along with an enormous quantity of expelled flatus, redolent of methane.
Parrots can definitely reason symbolically.
Of all the ways you can limit yourself, your own self-definition is the most powerful.
And to imagine all these things happen purely by chance is like imagining that a tornado can hit a junkyard and assemble the parts into a working 747 airplane. It’s very hard to believe.
But now reporters came to the story with the lead fixed in their minds; they saw their job as proving what they already knew. They didn’t want information so much as evidence of villainy. In this mode, they were openly skeptical of your point of view, since they assumed you were just being evasive. They proceeded from a presumption of universal guilt, in an atmosphere of muted hostility and suspicion.
Because raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place.
At the earliest drawings of the fractal curve, few clues to the underlying mathematical structure will be seen.” IAN MALCOLM.
But then, things never turn out the way you think they will.
What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There’s no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told – and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.
The essence of verification is multiple lines of reasoning that converge at a single point.
And finally, as if to emphasize their emergence from academia into the world, they dressed and spoke with what one senior mathematician called “a deplorable excess of personality.
Unable to construct genuine nanoassemblers, Xymos was using bacteria to crank out their molecules. This was genetic engineering, not nanotechnology.