The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.

Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.