Charles Stross Quotes

Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience...In the past twenty years we've made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We've pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we've begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects' ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn't move because they didn't want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will.
"In a nutshell, then, what I'm getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided." His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. "If people don't have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?"

It’s a classic case of misplaced accounting priorities, valuing depreciable capital assets a thousand times more highly than the fruits of actual labor—but that’s the nature of the government organization.

A current generation smartphone is more powerful than a 1991 supercomputer.

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

The Other Place, the astral plane, the land of dreams—it’s not a real place like, say, Walsall. But it’s a metaphor for a mathematical abstraction, a manifold containing an n-dimensional space where everything is the product of geometrical transformations, including mass and energy and time. Leakage between dimensions occurs there: it’s how we summon demons from the vasty deep, communicate with aliens, and try to extract our tax codes from the Inland Revenue.

Apocalypses are easier slept through than experienced.

I generally try to avoid funerals: they make me angry. I know the purpose of a funeral is to provide comfort and a sense of closure for the bereaved; and I agree, in principle, that this is generally a good thing. But the default package usually comes with a priest, and when they start driveling on about how Uncle Fred (who died aged sixty-two of a hideous brain tumor) is safe in the ever-loving arms of Jesus, the effect it has on me is not to make me love my creator: it’s to wish I could punch him in the face repeatedly.

“Yes-yes!” Jon bounces up and down on the balls of her feet.
“How much coffee did we have this morning?” Pete asks, suspicion dawning.
“All of it!”
Brains absorbs this fact slowly. The room he and Pete shared didn’t come with a filter machine, but there was an industrial-sized one in the motel lobby. If Jon drank the entire jug—
“How many times did you refill it?” asks Pete.
“Only three times! It kept running out!”
Brains glances at the vicar. “Are we going to need a tranquilizer dart?” he murmurs.

I wasn’t exaggerating the national suspicion toward strangers. It’s a survival trait on New Dresden; they’ve been breeding for paranoia for centuries.

The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn’t just want to be free—it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors.

I stare longingly at the bare chunk of space on the desktop. There may be a keyboard stitched into the lining of my cummerbund, but without a machine to plug it into it’s about as much use as a chocolate hacksaw.

They're too literal-minded," he said quietly. "All doing, no innovative thinking. They don't understand metaphors well; half of them think you're Baba Yaga returned, you know? We've been a, ah, stable culture too long. Patterns of belief, attitudes, get ingrained. When change comes, they are incapable of responding. Try to fit everything into their preconceived dogmas."

Mhari looks at me. I look at her. “No comment,” we chorus in unison. Then I add, “We’re just the performing monkeys; if you want a policy statement you’ll need to send the organ grinder a memo.”

Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally and directly make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreak unbelievable havoc, but where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that this world is administered: there is an extensive division of labour, among the magicians themselves and between the magicians and those who coordinate their activity. It’s bureaucratic, and also (therefore) chaotic, and it’s full of people at desks muttering curses and writing invocations, all beavering away at a small part of the big picture. The coordinators, because they don’t understand what’s going on, are easy prey for smooth-talking preachers of bizarre cults that demand arbitrary sacrifices and vanish with large amounts of money. Welcome to the IT department.

No, Bob," she says tiredly, "mutually assured destruction is not a reasonable basis for a marriage. Sooner or later one of us will get overstressed, there'll be an argument, and it'll be the kind of domestic that starts with thrown crockery and levels up to grenade launchers."