Charles Stross

The number one crime in any age: offending the money.

You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.

Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.

“Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience...In the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects’ ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn’t move because they didn’t want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will.

“In a nutshell, then, what I’m getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided.” His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. “If people don’t have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?”

Most police work boils down to minimizing the impact on society of stupidity; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority is about malice and deliberate evil, but it’s still almost all stupid.

“Now, consciousness. That’s a fun thing, isn’t it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you’ll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse—an internal simulation of the mouse’s likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator’s actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling—so the tribe could work collectively—and then reflexively, to simulate the individual’s own inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you’ve got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus—signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as ‘predator here’ or ‘food there.’”

In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them.

You know there’s no advantage to be gained by murdering idiots—it doesn’t teach the idiot anything and it might give onlookers the idea that you take them seriously.

I’m trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.

Liz isn’t simply not going by the book, she’s just about throwing it in the shredder.

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I’d never have time to do anything else.

Adams fancies himself as a big swinging dick in risk analytics: Leave out the “big” and “swinging” and he’s right.