Genesis

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times.

I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of a cool wave breaking over me. I am the places I have never seen, yet imagine when my eyes are closed. I am the taste of another's breath, the color of her hair. You mock me for the shortness of my life span, but it is this very fear of dying which breathes life into me. I am the thinker who thinks of thought. I am curiosity, I am reason, I am love, and I am hatred. I am indifference. I am the son of a father, who in turn was a father’s son. I am the reason my mother laughed and the reason my mother cried. I am wonder and I am wondrous. Yes, the world may push your buttons as it passes through your circuitry. But the world does not pass through me. It lingers. I am in it and it is in me. I am the means by which the universe has come to know itself. I am the thing no machine can ever make. I am meaning.

I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

In the end, living is defined by dying.

The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.

A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.

The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.

Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.

I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine.

The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.

Ugly's still ugly, no matter how you see it." "An interesting assertion. Justify it." "You bring twenty people in here," Adam told him, "and they'll all say the same thing. They'll all say you're ugly." "Bring in twenty of me," Art said, "and we'd all say your ass is prettier than your face." "There aren't twenty of you." "No, you're right. I'm unique. So I can safely say that all androids find you ugly. Not all humans find me ugly. So, technically, I'm better looking than you, using objective criteria.

But time passes. Fear becomes a memory. Terror becomes routine; it loses its grip.

Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?

Sometimes, even the very best course of action fails.

You're still just silicon," he said, as he turned the page.    "And you're just carbon," Art persevered. "Since when has the periodic table been grounds for discrimination?

Imagination is the bastard child of time and ignorance

In the end, living is defined by dying. Book- ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface.    Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.

... from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.

This is always the problem with building heroes. To keep them pure, we must build them stupid. The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.

For a society to function successfully, perhaps there needs to be a level of empathy that cannot be corrupted.

We know how to make mind, it is true, but we are a long way from being able to understand it.

Even the plainest of events is tied down by a thick tangle of permutation and possibility, but the human mind struggles with such complexity. In times of trouble, when the belief in simple gods breaks down, a cult of conspiracy arises. So it was back then. Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.

It is in conflict that our values are exposed.

You think the thing you call consciousness is some mysterious gift from the heavens, but in the end consciousness is nothing but the context in which your thinking occurs. Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory.

Just listening to you makes my back hurt. Why do you think that is?" "Your body is trying to distract your brain from things it doesn't want to hear. That's the problem with machines built by chance. Once a design flaw has become entrenched, it's so difficult to correct it.

Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that are values are exposed.

If the quality of an argument could be judged by the depth of its rage, I would have to concede defeat. Fortunately, I find the opposite is more often true.