60 quotes
People sometimes say, “If the world really has a simple explanation, then where did all the randomness and information come from?” We can think of the information as coming in with the passage of time. Each tick of time increases the depth of the world computer’s output.
Mind Tools (1987)
Janna knew full well that the classic dot-com move was to grab that golden parachute and bail like crazy before the investors and employees caught on.
Mad Professor (2007)
The meaning of life is beauty and love.
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (2016)
It would take a supercomputer to simulate this puddle in real time—maybe even all the computers in the world. Especially if you included the air currents pushing the raindrops this way and that. Computable or not, it kept happening.
Mad Professor (2007)
It was funny. I knew I didn't want the bomb to be a success. But yet I'd spent so many years working around physics labs that I couldn't stand not to do it right.
The Sex Sphere (1983)
In a sense mathematics is quite objective: the same deductions can become known to everyone who starts with the same axioms and definitions; the same abstract forms can be universally perceived. So it’s perfectly possible to talk math with a cockroach from Galaxy Z.
Mathematicians in Love (2006)
Sybil had an unreal, larger-than-life feeling . . . as if she were a person in a book.
The Sex Sphere (1983)
So, okay, I’ll go for the universal-automatist answer to “What is reality?”
Reality is made of gnarly computations.
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (2016)
The fifties were supposed to be a golden age when the pig had everything his way. That's what TV and the government wants us to believe: there was a time when no one made trouble. What about Kerouac, you assholes? What about Neal?
The Sex Sphere (1983)
What is reality?
Take all your perceptions and all of mine, take everyone’s thoughts and all the visions. In an infinite-dimensional space there is room to fit them all together; each is a piece of the infinite-dimensional One, and this One is reality.
The Fourth Dimension (1984)
“Security always soars along with unemployment,” said Pullen, nodding his head at his own wisdom. “We are in a major downturn. I’ve seen this before, so I know the drill. Locks, bolts, Dobermans, they’re all market leaders this quarter. That’s Capitalism 301, girls.”
Mad Professor (2007)
As he mentions this last sin, he looks down my nightgown, which I’m just loving. I press his hand against my warm thigh.
“Don’t worry, sweetie. I don’t live in Hell. I live in San Jose.”
Mad Professor (2007)
In the 1970s I even got to meet Kurt Gödel a few times. The king of the logicians. Gödel once told me, “The a priori is very powerful.” By this he meant that pure logic can take you farther than you might believe possible.
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (2016)
It’s perfect, isn’t it? It just goes to show that everything I’ve ever said about religion is true. The sky’s the limit when it comes to religious stupidity. Here we have a race of alien invaders, and the evangelical true believers are flocking here to get taken over.
Master of Space and Time (1984)
But Charles was the one who finally realized it was nuts to be walking around inside a sewer with a tweaker leading the way. The fact that Charles figured this out before me makes me wonder about myself. I think I’m spending too much time on my computer.
Mad Professor (2007)
I'm not a brave man. My self-image is of a very small and weak person. In point of fact, I'm almost six feet, and solidly built. But I was a late bloomer. I spent those formative early high-school years as a pudgy little science whimp. I'm still scared of big men with deep voices.
The Sex Sphere (1983)
I think of consciousness as a point, an "eye," that moves about in a sort of mental space. All thoughts are already there in this multi-dimensional space, which we might as well call the Mindscape. Our bodies move about in the physical space called the Universe; our consciousnesses move about in the mental space called the Mindscape.
Infinity and the Mind (1982)
Just as we all share the same Universe, we all share the same Mindscape. For just as you can physically occupy the same position in the Universe that anyone else does, you can, in principle, mentally occupy the same state of mind or position in the Mindscape that anyone else does.
Infinity and the Mind (1982)
There are many possible realities, infinitely many. Yet most of them are not . . . alive. Most of them are like books that no one ever actually wrote. A group-mind, like humanity's, lights up one given world. What makes this world different from some ghostly alternative universe is that we actually live here.
The Sex Sphere (1983)
But, come on, if you want to smoothly transmogrify a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother grinding up the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. Nature embodies superhuman intelligence just as she is.
The Great Awakening (2008)