I think the new era is simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil. That frame is based on the idea of isolated, immutable minds connected by tenuous, low-bandwidth links. But the post-Singularity world does fit with the larger tradition of change and cooperation that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of biological life). I think there are notions of ethics that would apply in such an era.

Mathematics essentially means the existence of an algorithm which is much more precise than that of ordinary language.

When you know this, then you’ve identified with the creative principle yourself, which is the God-power in the world, which means in you. It’s beautiful.

This means that we stop crusading—that is, acting for such abstract causes as the good, righteousness, peace, universal love, freedom, and social justice, and stop fighting against such equally abstract bogeys as communism, fascism, racism, and the imaginary powers of darkness and evil. For most of the hell now being raised in the world is well intentioned.

It should be possible to distinguish that part of the GNP which is derived from exhaustible and that which is derived from reproducible resources, as well as that part of consumption which represents effluvia and that which represents input into the productive system again. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever attempted to break down the GNP in this way.

As a product of human activity, civilization is part of the so-called natural world, not separate from it.

If you are playing a game according to (59) certain rules and set the playing-machine to play for victory, you will get victory if you get anything at all, and the machine will not pay the slightest attention to any consideration except victory according to the rules. If you are playing a war game with a certain conventional interpretation of victory, victory will be the goal at any cost, even that of the extermination of your own side, unless this condition of survival is explicitly contained in the definition of victory according to which you program the machine.

We’re really good at identifying things as other. We’re not really good at understanding when we’re the same or when we’re part of an integrated system that’s actually functioning together in some kind of cohesive way.

Ordinary language as we are using it here is a very bizarre behavioral pattern. I mean, when you deconstruct it and think about it, first of all, just notice: other animals don’t do this. Dolphins, honeybees aside, they don’t do what we do. There are no Miltons among the honeybees, I think. So what’s happening is: we have thoughts. We want to share these thoughts. We have evolved a system where the thoughts are transduced into mouth noises; small mouth noises which are conventionally assigned meaning—in other words, inside the context of a culture. “Book” means “book” in English. “Book” does not mean this in some other language. It may mean something else: “food,” “sex,” or “death.” We assign sound-signatures to meaning. We then make these sounds with our mouths. A pressure wave moves acoustically through the air. It enters the ear of the intended listener. The listener also has a dictionary, acquired through cultural convention. The incoming acoustical signals are downloaded. The dictionary is looking them up. If the dictionaries match, then we say “understanding” is taking place.

Reality is, of course, neither matter nor spirit. It is a percept, not a concept, and everyone knows what it is in the sense that one knows how to breathe without the least knowledge of physiology.

Particularly deep in human evolutionary history is yes & no. By coos of affirmation and snorts of disapproval, elders reinforce the successes and errors of the youths they teach—a pattern that must antedate any accompanying words. Primates condition each other with painful bites and comforting strokes. Reward & punishment imprints yes & no into the neuronal wetware, encouraging certain activities in life’s arena, banishing others behind walls of taboo.

Delegated authority is lineal, visual, hierarchical. The authority of knowledge is nonlineal, nonvisual, and inclusive.

It’s about not believing, not consuming, not following. It’s about taking back direct experience. If we could feel our circumstance, if we could feel what we’re doing to the Earth and each other, we wouldn’t do it! It’s that simple—because it’s too horrible. But you can anesthetize yourself with ideology, with wealth, with distance, with religious obsession, and so forth and so on, and then you can’t tell shit from shinola. But pain is pain, agony is agony. There’s plenty of it out there. So I think the precondition for any kind of response to that—any kind of political or reforming response to it—is to feel. And that means taking back your own social space from the machinery of media and domination and value-manipulation and so forth and so on.

Words such as “enlightenment” or “awakening” point not to a one-time event that happened yesterday or that might happen tomorrow. Enlightenment is only Here/Now. And it is not really an event in the usual sense, nor is it a personal achievement. It is the falling away (or transparency) of all beliefs and ideas, the popping of the imaginary (conceptual) bubble of encapsulation and separation, the recognition of oneself as no-thing and everything.

When there is enough total awareness in the overall system of humanity, humanity itself will lock into a new system of organization, and will become an autonomous, self-steering, brain-like system.

In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.

On the collective level, we incubate our society through the generations within cultural shells. In what ways do these fuzzy matrices of technology, language, art, science, and architecture, and of values, laws, and myths, separate us too harshly from nature? In what ways do they connect us to nature via bridges unachievable without such sheltering from the storms of time’s brutal uncertainties? The inquiries out into nature we have launched from such shells reveal new borders that serve as paradigms for the next stages of cultural evolution.

To try to play a no-lose game is impossible. We set ourselves an impossible task, and that makes us feel very frustrated. Always frustrated, because we’re trying to do what can’t be done. You want it good all the time. You want sunshine every day—okay, a desert for you. No, that’s not what you wanted, was it? Do you really want a world which is all positive? No, nobody really does. Only, we think we do and we think we ought to.

The seed develops into the tree. And you might say, from one point of view, then, that the point of the seed is the tree; that’s the purpose of the seed. But that doesn’t really hold up, because then the tree goes and has seeds again. And so you might say, then, that the purpose of the tree is the seed. Which is which? The whole thing is one process, you see? They really aren’t parts. The seed isn’t one event and the tree another. It’s all one long, continuous event, going on and on just for the sake of going on and on.

The brain is not productive of thought, but acts—so to speak—as a kind of reducing-valve, preventing us from being too omniscient. Because obviously, if we have to get out of the way of the traffic on Hollywood Boulevard, it’s no good being aware of everything that’s going on in the universe—we have to be aware of the approaching bus. And this is what the brain does for us; it narrows the field down so that we can go through life without getting into serious trouble. But—as many people have experienced, and as all the teachers of the great religions have insisted should be the case—we can and ought to open ourselves up.

There is still much to be said for the old theistic argument that the materialist-mechanistic atheist is declaring his own intelligence to be no more than a special form of unintelligence. Uncomplimentary remarks about the universe return like boomerangs to the parts of the universe that make them.

Individualism is not the only game in town, and there are moral and flourishing modes of existence that are in tension with that paradigm and are best achieved by escaping from it.

It needs only to be good enough, which in the case of our species meant a level of intelligence sufficient to enable us to outwit the competitors in our ecological niche.

The word “fragment” really means—its root is “to smash,” you see. So if you imagine taking a watch, you could find its parts; but if you smashed it, you would get fragments, not parts. You divide it in irrelevant ways, right, and break it up. See, if the world means a lot of separate places and people and so on, even though they are really connected, we will start smashing it up and apparently getting a confirmation of the correctness of our meaning—not noticing we have produced that division.