Prequel to "Blindsight". Pretty good although I struggle even more actually understanding what's happening. Sometimes the language gets so obscure, so deep-yet-vaguely technical that it's hard to understand. Still a good read.
"I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams"
William Shakespeare
The Semmelweis reflex or "Semmelweis effect" is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms.
The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision.
Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.
Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations-and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren't any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.
"Rakshi and her kind, they're wise to the old school. You leak footage showing the slants skewering babies and it'll take them maybe thirty seconds to find a pixel that doesn't belong. Discredit the whole campaign. People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe. The great thing about making yourself the villain is nobody's likely to contradict you."
"I have never for one instant seen clearly within myself. How then would you have me judge the deeds of others?"
Maurice Maeterlinck
Imagine you're Siri Keeton, he remembered. And gleaned from a later excerpt of the same signal: Imagine you're a machine.
"It's a literary affectation. He's trying to be poetic. Putting yourself in the character's head, that kind of thing."
