"Peter Watts - Flesh Made Word" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

need of therapy over a fucking cat. And if I was, you could--"
--have at least been there this morning.
He caught himself. I'm angry, he realised. Isn't that strange. I
haven't used this feeling for years.
5 Watts

It seemed odd that anything so old could have such sharp edges.
"Sorry," he said evenly. "I didn't mean to snap. It's just -- I
heard enough platitudes at the vet, you know? I'm sick of people
saying he wants to die when they mean It would cost too much.
And I'm especially sick of people saying love when they mean
economics."
Lynne put her arms around him. "There was nothing they could
have done."
He stood there, swaying slightly, almost oblivious to her
embrace.
Carol, how much did I pay to keep you breathing? And when
did I decide you weren't worth the running tab?
"It's always economics," he said. And brought his arms up to
hold her.


"You want to read minds."
Not Carol's voice, this time. This time it belonged to that guy
from Southam ... Mosby, that was it. Mosby's program sat in
memory, directing a chorus of electrons that came out sounding
like he did, a cheap auditory clone. Wescott preferred it to the
original.
"Read minds?" He considered. "Actually, right now I'm just
trying to build a working model of one."
"Like me?"
"No. You're just a fancy menu. You ask questions; depending
on how I answer them you branch to certain others. You're linear.
Minds are more ... distributed."
"Thoughts are not signals, but the intersections of signals."
"You've read Penthorne."
"I'm reading him now. I've got Biomedical Abstracts online."
"Mmmm."
"I'm also reading G├╢del," the program said. "If he's right, you'll
never get an accurate model of the human brain, because no box is
big enough to hold itself."
Flesh Made Word 6

"So simplify it. Throw away the details, but preserve the
essence. You don't want to make your model too big anyway; if it's
as complicated as the real thing, it's just as hard to understand."
"So you just cut away at the brain until you end up with
something simple enough to deal with?"
Wescott winced. "If you've got to keep it to vidbits, I guess
that's as good as any."