If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert
Peter Watts
What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?
philosophy
You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones.
life wisdom intelligence
People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.
nature humanity
But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.
intelligence comprehension
Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life meunderstand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.
stars space
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 the quake. One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around.
story
But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.
universe
I don't understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.
vampire fiction-novel
Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.
brain
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.
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 aglow with St. Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.
fire
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 just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals. Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.
humans civil-liberties
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