
Saved by Jonathan Simcoe and
The Mountain in the Sea: A Novel
Saved by Jonathan Simcoe and
café’s kahvalti of olives, feta, hard-boiled egg, flatbread, and fig jam.
The plastic siding of the main building was peeled away like scales torn from a dead fish.
We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think
Because he had no terminal, no pen, no paper, he kept this information in the memory palace he had built in his mind. His memory palace was a Japanese inn. Not just any inn: it was the Minaguchi-ya, on the Tokaido Road, between Tokyo and Kyoto.
Not only do we not agree on how to measure or recognize consciousness in others, but we are also unable to even “prove” it exists in ourselves. Science often dismisses our individual experiences—what it feels like to smell an orange, or to be in love—as qualia. We are left with theories and metaphors for consciousness: A stream of experience. A sel
... See moreAnd then Ha saw it. Yes. This was why the world would never build another humanoid AI. The smile was perfect. Sincere, unaffected. Fully human. And because of that, the smile was like the shadow of your own death.
Meaning is not neuronal calculus in the brain, or the careful smudges of ink on a page, or the areas of light and dark on a screen. Meaning has no mass or charge. It occupies no space—and yet meaning makes a difference in the world. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think
We are shaped and limited by our skeletons. Jointed, defined, structured. We create a world of relationships that mirrors that shape: a world of rigid boundaries and binaries. A world of control and response, master and servant. In our world, as in our nervous systems, hierarchy rules. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think
There is no silence in the living nervous system. An electrical symphony of communication streams through our neurons every moment we exist. We are built for communication. Only death brings silence. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think