{"author":"Ted Chiang","author_id":"Ted+Chiang","total_quotes":27,"quotes":[{"text":"And then there will be the times when I see you laughing. Like the time you’ll be playing with the neighbor’s puppy, poking your hands through the chain-link fence separating our back yards, and you’ll be laughing so hard you’ll start hiccupping. The puppy will run inside the neighbor’s house, and your laughter will gradually subside, letting you catch your breath. Then the puppy will come back to the fence to lick your fingers again, and you’ll shriek and start laughing again. It will be the most wonderful sound I could ever imagine, a sound that makes me feel like a fountain, or a wellspring.","author":"Ted Chiang","tags":["children","family","happiness","love","short-story"],"id":92,"author_id":"Ted+Chiang"},{"text":"When Arecibo is not listening to anything else, it hears the voice of creation.","author":"Ted Chiang","tags":["arecibo","communication","creation","listening","sound","the-big-bang","the-universe"],"id":42168,"author_id":"Ted+Chiang"},{"text":"I would have liked to experience more of the heptapods' worldview, to feel the way they feel. Then, perhaps I could immerse myself fully in the necessity of events, as the must, instead of merely wading in its surf for the rest of my life.","author":"Ted Chiang","tags":["deterministic","sci-fi","science-fiction"],"id":48337,"author_id":"Ted+Chiang"},{"text":"He tells people that they can no more expect justice in the afterlife than in the mortal plane, but he doesn't do this to dissuade them from worshipping God; on the contrary, he encourages them to do so. What he insists on is that they not love God under a misapprehension, that if they wish to love God, they be prepared to do so no matter His intentions. God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful, and understanding that is essential to true devotion.","author":"Ted Chiang","tags":["blind-faith","devotion","faith-in-god","heaven","justice","mercy","mercy-of-god","religious-faith","salvation"],"id":77266,"author_id":"Ted+Chiang"},{"text":"Like physical events with their causal and teleological interpretations, every linguistic event had two possible interpretations: as a transmission of information and as the realization of a plan.","author":"Ted Chiang","tags":["causal-interpretation","causality","information","linguistic-event","louise-banks","physical-events","planning","possible-interpretations","realization-of-a-plan","teleology","transmission"],"id":84986,"author_id":"Ted+Chiang"},{"text":"I knew it was foolhardy; men of experience say, 'Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity,.","author":"Ted Chiang","tags":["life-lesson"],"id":107878,"author_id":"Ted+Chiang"},{"text":"It'll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself.","author":"Ted Chiang","tags":["children","parenthood"],"id":116541,"author_id":"Ted+Chiang"},{"text":"Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.","author":"Ted Chiang","tags":["forgiveness","repentance"],"id":118135,"author_id":"Ted+Chiang"},{"text":"I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term 'self-aware.'Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.I know how they make up my thoughts.These thoughts.","author":"Ted Chiang","tags":["cognition","psychology","self-aware","sentience"],"id":119510,"author_id":"Ted+Chiang"},{"text":"In the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to give a rigorous foundation to mathematics using formal logic as their basis. They began with what they considered to be axioms, and used those to derive theorems of increasing complexity. By page 362, they had established enough to prove '1 + 1 = 2.","author":"Ted Chiang","tags":["complexity","mathematics"],"id":136912,"author_id":"Ted+Chiang"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":27,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}