Goddamn you," Jacob said. "There's no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.
Robert Charles WilsonConsciousness," according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The "self" was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.
Robert Charles Wilson