Exhalation: Stories (Kindle highlights)

Do you now understand why I say the future and the past are the same? We cannot change either, but we can know both more fully. (loc. 361-362)
Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity. (loc. 423-424)
Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons. (loc. 496-499)
Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough. (loc. 510-511)
The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I am glad that it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on. (loc. 732-735)
And then, our universe will be in a state of absolute equilibrium. All life and thought will cease and, with them, time itself. (loc. 750-751)
And whether or not your brain is impelled by the air that once impelled mine, through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you. (loc. 766-769)
Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same. (loc. 784-785)
People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable Lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we’ve all encountered: the idea that free will doesn’t exist. It just wasn’t harmful until you believed it. (loc. 808-811)
Unfortunately, such reasoning is faulty; every form of behavior is compatible with determinism. One dynamic system may fall into a basin of attraction and wind up at a fixed point, while another exhibits chaotic behavior indefinitely, but both are completely deterministic. (loc. 817-819)
Pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important; what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has. (loc. 821-823)
He feels that helping a new life-form express itself is the most exciting work an animator could be doing. (loc. 903-904)
He knows plenty of people who take nootropics or use transcranial magnetic stimulation to boost their performance at work, but so far no employer has made it a requirement. He shakes his head in disbelief. (loc. 1919-1920)
Lifelogs are the most complete photo album imaginable, but like most photo albums, they lie dormant except on special occasions. (loc. 2586-2587)
It is an art that we Europeans know. When a man speaks, we make marks on the paper. When another man looks at the paper later, he sees the marks and knows what sounds the first man made. In that way the second man can hear what the first man said. (loc. 2623-2625)
Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the Internet knows that technology can encourage bad habits. (loc. 2685-2687)
But having a perfect memory wasn’t the blessing one might imagine it to be. (loc. 2735-2735)
Writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate. (loc. 2843-2847)
It seemed to me that continuous video of my entire childhood would be full of facts but devoid of feeling, simply because cameras couldn’t capture the emotional dimension of events. (loc. 2876-2877)
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn. (loc. 2887-2891)
It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film. (loc. 2892-2894)
We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound. (loc. 3134-3136)
Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, and overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives. Written records are vulnerable to every kind of error, and their interpretation is subject to change, but at least the words on the page remain fixed, and there is real merit in that. (loc. 3150-3152)
I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong. (loc. 3157-3158)
But for me, science is the true modern cathedral, an edifice of knowledge every bit as majestic as anything made of stone. (loc. 3454-3455)
“Science is not just the search for the truth,” he said. “It’s the search for purpose.” And I had no response. I had always assumed those were one and the same, but what if they aren’t? (loc. 3623-3625)
I’ve always assumed that this meant that I was acting in accordance with your will, Lord, and your reason for making me. But if it’s in fact true that you have no purpose in mind for me, then that sense of fulfillment has arisen solely from within myself. What that demonstrates to me is that we as humans are capable of creating meaning for our own lives. (loc. 3702-3705)