Earth Subsystem Quotes

Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardized subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels for incoming data—one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing. By the orphan's two-hundredth iteration, the channels themselves were fully formed, but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for classifying and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed. Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred meters beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fiber and satellite links the input channels could bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from probes orbiting every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests and oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium. The first problem of perception was learning how to choose from this superabundance.

We have one mind, and it contains both thought and feeling. Passion and reason combine as one in our mind. Only when we are at war with ourselves do they diverge, but this is pathology not a healthy state. They are both parts of the whole, each a subsystem embedded in an integrated, larger system. There is nothing more human than our reason and our emotions. We are probably the most emotional creature on the earth as a result of the complexity and subtlety of our thought, our mind's and body's role in adaptation, and our dependency on other people, all of which are relevant to survival and how we flourish as individuals and a species.

An intriguing aspect of the causal sequence exhibited in the tectonic system is that the subsystems that keep the whole causal chain moving are reciprocally self-formative.