The Dimensions of a Cave

Maybe consciousness is our way of condensing existence into a shareable form.

There's no return once self-awareness has distinguished appearance from reality, our words from the motives underlying them. This is the meaning of the expulsion from paradise, our departure from the state of nature with its innocence and violence, to something far more ambivalent: it is the parable of our guilt, of inward shame, in moving from awa

But Quentin believed in reading as a lifeline to the past—to the store of experience that made the foundation of our species. By assembling our thoughts like risers in a staircase the generations would climb. Those who could draw from this reservoir would exist beyond the jealous shackles of time, grasp the utterness of contingency, and know the wi

'you could say stories are an especially useful storage format, a type of compression, and consciousness is the program that unpacks it.'