‘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.’

Are we trapped, then, in the world our language makes for us, unable to see beyond the boundaries of it? I say we are not. Anyone who has watched their dog dance its happiness in the sand and felt that joy themselves—anyone who has looked into a neighboring car and seen a driver there lost in thought, and smiled and seen the image of themselves in

You’re more than conscious. You are also human. It doesn’t matter what you are made of, or how you are born. That isn’t what determines it. What determines you are human is that you fully participate in human interaction and the human symbolic world. You live in the world humans created, perceiving that world as humans perceive it, processing

What does it mean to be a self? I think, more than anything else, it means the ability to select between different possible outcomes in order to direct oneself toward a desired outcome: to be future-oriented. When every day is the same, when we are not presented with the necessity to choose between different possibilities, we say we don’t “feel

“But what we did not render obsolete was the fear humans have of other minds. This society—what we call modern society, what we always think of as the most important time the world has ever known, simply because we are in it—is just the sausage made by grinding up history. Humanity is still afraid the minds we make to do our dirty work for us—our

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”

And because of that, the smile was like the shadow of your own death. Evrim’s existence implicated yours. It implied you, too, were nothing more than a machine—a swarm of preprogrammed impulses iterating endlessly. If Evrim was a conscious thing, and made, then maybe you were made as well. A construct made of different materials. A skeleton walking

There is a “real” world, out there, but we do not perceive it directly. It is assembled by the sensory and nervous systems of each individual animal, and it is assembled differently by every one of them. What we perceive is a construct. Every animal’s perception of the world, constructed by its evolved sensory apparatus and nervous system to take

‘The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.’