But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside our skulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus. —Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan,

But here’s what I think: If you are a company that creates artificial minds, wouldn’t you want to study a new kind of mind up close? If the Con Dao Sea Monster is smart, I bet DIANIMA wants to know how smart. How it works, and maybe how it got that way.”

“Here we are,” Ha said, “telling stories around the campfire to fend off the terrors of the dark.” “I am not afraid,” Evrim said. “Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan minimized that in me. It’s counterproductive. She allowed me just enough to keep me from being reckless.”

We give words only to the things that matter to us as a society. The things that make no difference to us are erased from our world by never becoming a part of language in the first place. In this way, each language organizes the world into a pattern. Each language decides what has meaning—and what does not. As native speakers, we are born inside

“Sort of. Like a map of a place you’ve never seen before. Except you also don’t know what the symbols or shapes of the map represent. You have to figure out what they mean according to their relationships with one another.” “And most people do this with VR tech.” “Yes. And AI: they have programs that basically model the network for them—like

You have seen, though, the many stray cats and dogs in our city.” “I have.” “And wondered about them?” “I suppose.” “They are old Istanbulites. Some of the oldest, and caring for them has been a tradition for longer than anyone can remember. And not only these animals: The Ottomans established foundations which fed street dogs and wolves in the

Across its surface flowed a syntax of shapes—a steady sequence of silhouettes—ringed, scrolled, involuted, whorled. The figures danced on the octopus’s skin. The place the two octopuses had chosen was bathed in light by a beam-angle from the penetrated hull, and the patterns across the larger one’s pale skin reminded Ha of the articulated cut-out

“Yes, that is true,” Ha said. “We can’t conclude the octopus made this. But at the least, it is a manuport: an object moved purposefully from its original context because it had importance or significance.

A philosopher of the twentieth century, Paul Virilio, said: ‘When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.’