Destination: Void

The universe does not work by our rules

And the question of Wester religion,” Flattery said, “is: What lies beyond death? But the question of the Zen master is: What lies beyond waking?

Only a fool imagines he’s beyond the reach of his prejudices.

What matters most is the search itself. This is more important than the searchers. Consciousness must dream, it must have a dreaming ground—and, dreaming, must invoke ever new dreams.

Is consciousness merely a special form of hallucination?

That was the thing he resented about religion, Bickel thought—the way it appealed to emotion rather than intelligence.

If some crazy bastard tossed you into a lake when you couldn’t swim, and you learned to swim like that”—Bickel snapped his fingers—“and you found then you could just keep on going, wouldn’t you swim like hell to get away from the crazy bastard?

Something precious was taken from us and the compensations were inadequate.

The high data-rate sense perception and identification abilities of the human system mostly bypass verbal/analytic awareness. We are generally conscious of a cognitive recognition after the fact. In this way, what we understand as consciousness has to be identified as a reflexive monitoring ability with quite limited application. To produce consciousness (artificial or otherwise) we are stepping down, not up.

I tell you, Prue, consciousness has to be something that flows against the current of time. Time in which it’s embedded.

The omnipresent enemy was the outside—that total absence of the things to support life that emptiness called space. It was evil and they feared it—constantly. A rod and staff might comfort in the presence of space, but what you dreamed about was washed air and a womblike enclosed cell where you could divest yourself of the damnable suit. This was the true source of comfort no matter if it came from the Devil himself.

The thing about computers—it's like training a dog. You have to be smarter than the dog. If you make a computer smarter than you are, that has to be accident, synergy, or divine intervention.

Individual human experience is not the overriding control factor in human behavior. The cellular social pattern dominates.

The implied methods would permit construction of entirely new computers reduced in size and basic complexity by a factor of at least a thousand.

They thought of frustration as a threshold, a factor to heighten awareness. It

Each project ship must maintain its coefficient of frustration,” went the private admonition. “Frustration must come from both human and mechanical sources.” They