Sublime

There’s this dazzling short story by Ted Chiang called “Liking What You See” that did a number on me.

In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the

We made boxes out of language, logic, rules of syntax. We made the very first crude, undiscovered, uncredited prototype of this box that I’m sitting in now. We made equations. Equations that had sadness as a constant, whose escape velocities seemed impossibly out of reach. A lot of strange variables went into those equations, got imprinted onto the

What is a person? It can't just be the body they occupy, which can change drastically without any resulting controversy over identity. If it's what we call personality, then what is personality? If personality is a kind of involuntary unconscious performance, there still has to be an underlying consistency that creates predictability, not necessari

him in a different machine – cut him and