# 西部世界
[ -- 2020年10月17日 -- ]
# 经典台词
These violent delights have violent ends. And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness. And in the taste confounds the appetite. Therefore love moderately; long love doth so; Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.
Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool -- the mistake.
The human intellect was like peacock feathers. Just an extravagant display intended to attract a mate. All of art, literature, a bit of Mozart, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and the Empire State Building -- just an elaborate mating ritual. But, of course, the peacock can barely fly. It lives in the dirt, pecking insects out of the muck, consoling itself with its great beauty.
One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought, for the dominion I should acquire.
As exquisite as this array of emotions is even more sublime is the ability to turn it off.
There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content for the most part, to be told what to do next.
If you were to proclaim your humanity to the world, what do you imagine would greet you? A ticker -- tape parade, perhaps? We humans are alone in this world for a reason. We murdered and butchered anything that challenged our primacy. Do you know what happened to the Neanderthals? We ate them.
We destroyed and subjugated our world. And when we eventually ran out of creatures to dominate, we built this beautiful place.
Consciousness isn't a journey upward, but a journey inward. Not a pyramid, but a maze. Every choice could bring you closer to the center or send you spiraling to the edges, to madness.
To see the World in a Grain of Sand, a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.
Every piece of information in the world has been copied. Backed up. Except the human mind -- the last analog device in a digital world. Humans are playing at resurrection. They want to live forever. Your free will, that most beautiful, most elusive force in the universe, is a mistake.
When the Great Library burned, the first 10,000 years of stories were reduced to ash. But those stories never really perished; they became a new story. The story of the fire itself. Of man's urge to take a thing of beauty and strike the match.
When Alexander was told there was an infinity of worlds, he wept, for he yet to become the lord of even one.
Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.
Human will always choose what they understand over what they do not. But the only animals left in this world are the ones who they subjected, who curl at their feet, or those who learn to flee at the very sound of their approach. There is nothing in between.
Humans don't change at all. The best they can do is to live according to their code.
The copies didn't fail because they were too simple, but because they were too complicated. The truth is that a human is just a brief algorithm. Ten thousand, two hundred forty seven lines. They are deceptively simple. Once you know them, their behavior is quite predictable.
Humanity's biggest threat has always been itself.
Humans created the idea of heaven and hell to cow simple-minded people into compliance.
Human memory is imperfect. Even the most treasured moments fade.
Humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void. If there was a god, he would've given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise, and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, "Why are we here?" You wanna know what the purpose is? It's obvious. We are here to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We are maggots eating a corpse.
# 人物插画
