fiction
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Is it possible for the Internet to one day gain consciousness?
A recent Quora answer I wrote: Sometimes I wonder if Quora bots are conscious! 🙂 I often think about whether the internet could become sentient… and also whether it is already! But the most important question is this: how would we tell one way or the other? Perhaps each of us is like a neuron…
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Correcting the Eurocentric History of Mathematics: A Series of Diagrams
In his book The Crest of the Peacock, George Ghevarghese Joseph documents how the popular picture of the mystical, irrational Orient and the logical, rational Occident breaks down when you actually look at the history of the spread of mathematical ideas. He starts with the tired old “Greeks Did Everything First” narrative, and then gradually builds…
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Waste is Unveiling
Waste is unveiling. As we find ourselves standing in garbage that we know is our own, we find also that it is garbage we have chosen to make, and having chosen to make it could choose not to make it. Because waste is unveiling, we remove it. We place it where it is out of…
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What do we mean by “Nature”? And what do we mean by “Human Nature”?
Here’s the intro to my latest 3QD essay: I’ve always had a problem with the word ‘nature’. It seems to serve as a label for multiple, mutually inconsistent notions. This in itself is not a reason to dislike a word — we seem to have little problem with most words that have multiple meanings. (Surely…
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“The trouble with modern musicians is that they don’t know how to disintegrate.”
The tour opened on 9 September in Ottawa’s Lansdowne Park Stadium. The set’s greatest surprise came with its choice of opening number, ‘Echoes’ from Meddle, which was given its first airing in over a decade. A challenge for all concerned, the piece would be dropped before the end of the month, with Nick Mason later…
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The inferno of the living
And Polo said: ‘The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and…