Nature is thus more than a diverse gene bank harboring undiscovered herbal cures for future disease -- although it is certainly this. Nature is also a "meme bank", an idea factory. Vital, postindustrial paradigms are hidden in every jungly ant hill. The billion-footed beast of living bugs and weeds, and the aboriginal human cultures which have extracted meaning from this life, are worth protecting, if for no other reason than for the postmodern metaphors they still have not revealed. 引自第3页
The tiny bees in my hive are more or less unware of their colony. By definition their collective hive mind must transcend their small bee minds. As we wire ourselves up into a hivish network, many things will emerge that we, as mere neurons in the network, don't expect, don't understand, can't control, or don't even perceive. That's the price for any emergent hive mind.引自第28页
the mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consist in the comparisons of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest.引自第43页
Medieval life is remarkably unnarcissistic. Common folk had only vague notions of their own image in the broad sense. Their individual and social identities were informed by participating in rituals and traditions rather than by reflection. On the other hand, the modern world is being paved with mirrors. We have ubiquitous TV cameras, and ceaseless daily polling ("63 percent of Us Are Divorced") to mirror back to us every nuance of our collective action. 引自第72页
half of the living world is codependent! Business consultants commonly warn their clients against becoming a symbiont company dependent upon a single customer-company, or a single supplier. But many do, and as far as I can tell, live profitable lives, no shorter on average than other companies. The surge of alliance-making in the 1990s among large coperations - particularly among those in the information and network industries - is another facet of an increasing coevolutionary economic world. Rather than eat or compete with a competitor, the two form an alliance - a symbiosis.引自第75页
Many evolutionary biologists in the last century such as T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Darwin, too, understood it intuitively - that the physical environment shapes its creatures and the creatures shape their environment, and if considered in the long view, the environment is the organism and the organism is the environment.引自第81页
It turns out that no matter what clever strategy you engineer or evolve in world laced by chameleon-on-a-mirrior loops, if it is applied as a perfectly pure rule that you obey absolutely, it will not be evolutionary resilient to competing strategies. That is, a competing strategy will figure out how to exploit your rule in the long run.引自第88页
