- “What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire. It’s a troubling paradox—I have total control, but only to the extent I have control over myself. My emotions. My inner storm. The secret engines that drive me. If there are infinite worlds, how do I find the one that is uniquely, specifically mine? I stare at the page and begin to write down every detail of my Chicago that comes to mind. I paint my life with words. The sounds of the children in my neighborhood walking to school together, their voices like a stream flowing over rocks —high and burbling. Graffiti on the faded white brick of a building three blocks from my house that was so artfully done it was never painted over. I meditate on the intricacies of my home. The fourth step on the staircase that always creaks. The downstairs bathroom with a leaky faucet. The way my kitchen smells as coffee brews first thing in the morning. All the tiny, seemingly insignificant details upon which my world hangs.”
- “Imagine you’re a fish, swimming in a pond. You can move forward and back, side to side, but never up out of the water. If someone were standing beside the pond, watching you, you’d have no idea they were there. To you, that little pond is an entire universe. Now imagine that someone reaches down and lifts you out of the pond. You see that what you thought was the entire world is only a small pool. You see other ponds. Trees. The sky above. You realize you’re a part of a much larger and more mysterious reality than you had ever dreamed of.”
- "In this moment, he is a man without memory, and the sense of being adrift in time is a crushing, existential horror. Like waking from a troubled sleep, when the lines between reality and dreams are still murky and you're calling out to ghosts."
- “Lately, he’s been reading the great philosophers and physicists. Plato to Aristotle. From Newton’s absolute time to Einstein’s relativistic. One truth seems to be surfacing from the cacophony of theories and philosophies—no one has a clue. Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Some days, it feels like a river flowing past him. Others, like something he’s sliding down the surface of. Sometimes, it feels like it’s all already happened, and he’s just experiencing incremental slivers, moment to moment, his consciousness like the needle in the grooves of a record that already exists—beginning, middle, and end. As if our choices, our fates, were locked from our first breath. But on a night like this, of a restless mind and dreams of ghosts, time feels secondary to the true prime mover—memory. Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.”
- "Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That's what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other."
- Been meaning to ask you something,” Slade says, interrupting her reverie. She looks at him across the table. “Why memory? Obviously, you were into this before your mom got sick.” She swirls the wine in her glass, sees the reflection of them sitting at the table in the two-story windows that look out into oceanic darkness.“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.” Helena leans forward, snaps her fingers. “Just what your brain does to interpret a simple stimulus like that is incredible. The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.” She lets him sit with that for a moment as she takes another glorious sip of wine. Slade asks, “What about flashbulb memories? The super-vivid ones imbued with extreme personal significance and emotion?” “Right. That gets at another illusion. The paradox of the specious present. What we think of as the ‘present’ isn’t actually a moment. It’s a stretch of recent time—an arbitrary one. The last two or three seconds, usually. But dump a load of adrenaline into your system, get the amygdala to rev up, and you create that hyper-vivid memory, where time seems to slow down, or stop entirely. If you change the way your brain processes an event, you change the duration of the ‘now.’ You actually change the point at which the present becomes the past. It’s yet another way that the concept of the present is just an illusion, made out of memories and constructed by our brain.” Helena sits back, embarrassed by her enthusiasm, suddenly feeling the wine going to her head. “Which is why memory,” she says. “Why neuroscience.” She taps her temple. “If you want to understand the world, you have to start by understanding—truly understanding—how we experience it.” Slade nods, says, “‘It is evident the mind does not know things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them.’” Helena laughs with surprise. “So you’ve read John Locke.” “What?” Slade asks. “Just because I’m a tech guy, I never picked up a book? What you’re talking about is using neuroscience to pierce the veil of perception—to see reality as it truly is.” “Which is, by definition, impossible. No matter how much we understand about how our perceptions work, ultimately we’ll never escape our limitations.” Slade just smiles.
~ Excerpts from Recursion, by Blake Crouch
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