Thus are our memories compressed, integrated into sparkling jewels to be embedded in the limited space of our minds. I only remember the way sunlight through the kitchen window glinted from her forearm, an arc as lovely as her smile.Ī lit forearm, laughter, food of the gods. I can’t remember the dress she wore or what she had bought I can’t remember what we did for the rest of that afternoon I can’t recreate the exact timbre of her voice or the precise shapes of her features, the lines at the corners of her mouth or the name of her perfume. “We have children because we can’t remember our own first taste of ambrosia.” Then she broke the rest of the chocolate bar in halves and fed a piece to me and ate the other herself. We laughed as we watched your eyes widen in surprise at the texture, your face scrunch up at the biting bitterness, and then your whole body relax as the sweetness overwhelmed your taste buds, aided by the dance of a thousand disparate organic compounds. “Theobromine,” your mother said, “means the food of the gods.” She broke off a piece from a candy bar and put it in your mouth while you sat in the high chair.Īs the stearate in the cocoa butter absorbed the heat from your mouth and melted over your tongue, complex alkaloids were released and seeped into your taste buds: twitchy caffeine, giddy phenethylamine, serotonic theobromine. Remember the first time you tasted chocolate? It was a summer afternoon your mother had just come back from shopping.
It has been argued that thinking is a form of compression. They are said to never die, but it is arguable whether they ever live. Thus, while the Telosians do not forget, they also do not remember.
Every year, a fresh segment is added at the head to record the future every year, an old segment is discarded from the tail, consigning the past to oblivion. The Telosian organ of cognition is housed inside a segmented body that buds and grows at one end while withering and shedding at the other. Infinity pressing down upon the finite is clearly untenable. Eidetic reminiscence is a fact of existence. A painful memory may be replayed countless times as well, each time creating a fresh outrage. A joyful memory may be relived countless times, each replay introducing new discoveries. They can freeze a scene and zoom in to focus on any detail they can parse and re-parse each conversation to extract every nuance. When they wish, they can recall every experience with absolute fidelity. The brains of Telosians record all the stimuli from their senses: every tingling along their hairy spine, every sound wave striking their membranous body, every image perceived by their simple-compound-refractive light-field eyes, every molecular gustatory and olfactory sensation captured by their waving stalk-feet, every ebb and flow in the magnetic field of their irregular, potato-shaped planet. My darling, my child, my connoisseur of sesquipedalian words and convoluted ideas and meandering sentences and baroque images, while the sun is asleep and the moon somnambulant, while the stars bathe us in their glow from eons ago and light-years away, while you are comfortably nestled in your blankets and I am hunched over in my chair by your bed, while we are warm and safe and still for the moment in this bubble of incandescent light cast by the pearl held up by the mermaid lamp, you and I, on this planet spinning and hurtling through the frigid darkness of space at dozens of miles per second, let’s read. “Interstellar radio links enhanced by exploiting the Sun as a gravitational lens.” Acta Astronautica 68.1 (2011): 76–84 (available at ).]Īn Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition By Ken Liu
“Oklo reactors and implications for nuclear science.” International Journal of Modern Physics E 23.04 (2014) (available at ).įor more on SETI and the Sun’s gravitational lens, see: “Inconstants of Nature”, Nautilus, Janu(available at ).ĭavis, E. “Is Consciousness Computable? Quantifying Integrated Information Using Algorithmic Information Theory.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.0126 (2014) (available at ).įor more on natural nuclear reactor piles, see: For more on consciousness as compression, see:
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