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And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.

Alan Lightman

At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Decision Every Fate Infinity Point World
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Character Pilot Strangle
Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Actual Cosmo Irrational Perhaps Rational World
People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Content Contradictory Long People Reason World
A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Action Contemplate Future Imagine Person Result
Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Complete Different Reader Sense Something Way
And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Course Depend Done Frighten Make Previous
And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Become Eventually Go Machine Mindless Unplug
I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

E-mail First Friend Gone Hours Every Many Message Moring Spend Tell Through Too
“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Change Diagnosis Draft Significant Ten Through Whole Wholesale
I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Consider Essayist Fiction Myself Writer
I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

E-mail Philosophy Position Taken
To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Atheist Belief Both End Room Spiritual Think
Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Love Much Physical Thing
Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Illogic Justification Logic Postdiction Prediction
Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Ahead Bonelike Extend Fossilize Future Infinitely Past Rigid Structure Time Well

And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.

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And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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