Template-based interactions—"Je voudrais un hot dog, s'il vous plaît … merci!"; "Où est le WC? … merci!"—where you more or less treat your interlocutor as a machine, are navigable for precisely the reason that they are of almost no cultural or experiential value. Even if your interlocutor's response is surprising or interesting, you might miss it. Wielding language's magic is intoxi-cating; becoming susceptible to it, even more so.

[Inormation entropy as "how unique or surprising is this?" threads through: text prediction, text generation, autocorrect, search, cloze tests, data compression and transmission, encryption, memory, summarization, random noise, language learning, language evolution…]

["They lived happily ever after" in information entropy terms means "Nothing noteworthy happened for the rest of their lives".]

[People ask "how did you meet your spouse?" and not "how did you stay married?" because the latter is a story of struggle and pain.]

[Entropy is why we place more value on advice from someone whose response is less predictable.]

[Pithy marketing phrases are "cliches with a diff".]

[Drug dealers and their clients have to constantly invent new language as if they were poets when referring to substances, because known euphemisms or cliches can mean jail.]

[Latin speakers naming those with whom they break bread "com-panis" ("with bread") led to our word "companion".]

[People are always changing as you get to know them—partly due to your presence: they are never still.]

[Neurons change their connection structure each time they fire. Functional brains change. Experience changes you or it didn't happen. Relating is risky because you can't get to know someone without changing them or somewhat becoming them.]

[We can't actually touch anything: our perception of contact is really body atoms and table atoms exerting electromagnetic force on each other—dynamic exchange rather than static contact.]

[An aptronym is a surname amusingly appropriate to one's occupation, such as poker champion Chris Moneymaker or British neurology duo Russell Brain and Henry Head.]

[The deaf] can comfortably sign while watching someone else sign. In large groups it still makes sense to have one "speaker" at a time, because people cannot look in more than one direction at a time, but conversations between pairs [have more overlapping communication than spoken conversations, as if they talk and listen simultaneously.]

[Conversation is best as duet over duel: each positioning the other to say great things, playing for the game and assist rather than the score.]

[Debate features adversarial "zero-sum" conversation, where weakening their position is as good as strengthening yours, and largely militaristic metaphors of] defending a statement, attacking a position, falling back to a weaker version of a thesis, countering one accusation with another.

[An alternative to the debate game could be one where two sides are given seemingly incompatible objectives for an upcoming legislation and scored on how well they argue that it supports their side. The score of each side added up and given to both sides, so they rank higher by collaborating more.]

[Answering questions about my book can mean: "short sound bites", "short anecdotes", "long considered reflections", or "long comprehensive explorations". I leave "pores" or pauses in my response to let the listener interject, hint at continuation, or change topics, and then gauge how deep to go based on that feedback.]

[Usage patterns show speakers using "uh" before shorter pauses of less than a second and "um" to indicate that a longer pause is ahead.]

[The longer you analyze stocks, the more markets have time to change. Fashion seasons also change while you shop; most] bad fashion is simply good fashion at the wrong time]

[Bryan Ferneyhough deliberately composes unperformable music to force interpreters to break out of simple reproduction and instead involve themselves as co-creators of site-specific performances (that can't be repeated).]

[Being spontaneous means keeping up with the situation, but you can't be sensitive if it changes while you're making sense of it.]

[Computers may be one of the first tools to preceed their tasks: first build it, then figure out what to do with it.]

"There is no shallow end," a philosophy professor told me. Because any objection whatsoever, from any angle, can fell a theory, you can't carve out ace of philosophical territory, master it in isola-, and move on to the next.

My first day of class in the philosophy major, the professor opens the semester by saying that anyone who says that "philosophy is useless" is already philosophizing, building up an intellectual argument to make a point that is important to them, and therefore defeating their own statement in the very breath of uttering it.

You question the assumptions of physics and you end up in metaphysics—a branch of philosophy. You question the assumptions of history and you end up in epistemology—a branch of philosophy. You try to take any other discipline out at the foundations and you end up in philosophy; you try to take philosophy out at the foundations and you only end up in meta-philosophy: even deeper in than when you started.

we create a caste system at our companies that mimics the caste system we create with respect to our own bodies and selves. My hands are mine, we say, but my brain is me. This fits in nicely with our sense of an inner homunculus pulling the levers and operating our body from a control room behind our eyeballs.

[If a musician is constantly and fluidly inventive, it's partly because they refuse to bore themselves.]

[What you call "being stuck" is for me "composing".]

[Art resists scale.]

What I can do here, I cannot—I cannot do in another place.

[Chess openings and closings can be tabulated, whereas the middle is actual gameplay.]

[Customer service] works by the gradual buildup of sympathy through failed attempted solutions. If person X has told you to try something and it doesn't work, person X feels slightly sorry for you. X is slightly responsible for the problem now, having used up some of your time. Person Y, however, is considerably less moved that you tried following her colleague X's advice to no avail-even if it is the same advice that she herself would have given you had she been party to that earlier conversation. That's beside the point. The point is that she wasn't the one who gave you that advice. So she is not responsible for your wasted time.

[The same customer service representative miraculously] returns. "I can make an exception for you," she says.

It occurs to me that an "exception" is what programmers call it when software breaks.

["Impersonal friends" are those we are drawn to for their type, which makes them more or less fungible, in contrast to specific individuals we care about which can't be swapped. The difference develops through shared history.]

I've seen it happen between friends: "Once again, you've neglected to do what you've promised." "Oh, there you go right in with that tone of yours!" "Great, let's just dodge the issue and talk about my tone instead! You're so defensive!" "You're the one being defensive! This is just like the time you x!" "For the millionth time, I did not even remotely x! You're the one who …" And on and on. […] each remark after the first is only about the previous remark. Th "context, a kind of "Markov chain" of riposte, meta-riposte, meta-meta-riposte. If we can be induced to sink to this level, of course the Turing test can be passed.

I imagine an ancient Egyptian woman, say, who catches a man looking tenderly into her eyes, up at the far extreme of her body near her useless, good-for-nothing brains, and chastises him, hand at her chest. Hey. I'm down here.

[If every act is the means to an end, "eudaimonia" (εuδauovia in Greek) describes the ultimate end of "well-being of spirit". Closer to "flourishing" than "happiness" (which could be through consuming a destructive vice) or "success" (which could be cutthroat if you win, scam, or kill). It's not a feeling: you either have it or not, regardless of how you feel. Related is "arete" which refers to "excellence" and "fulfillment of purpose":] Flowers are meant to bloom; knives are meant to cut; what are we meant to do?

I find it so tragic that when an infant cries, the parents sometimes have no idea what might be the cause of the cry—hunger? thirst? Dirty diaper? fatigue? If only the child could tell them! But no, they must simply run down the list—here's some food, no, still crying, here's a new diaper, no, still crying, here's your blanket, maybe you need a nap, no, still crying … But it occurs to me that this also describes my relationship to myself. When I am in a foul mood, I think, "How's my work going? How's my social life? How's my love life? How much water have I had today? How much coffee have I had today? How well have I been eating? How much have I been exercising? How have I been sleeping? How's the weather?" And sometimes that's the best I can do: eat some fruit, jog around the neighborhood, take a nap, and on and on till the mood changes and I think, "Oh, I guess that was it." I'm not much better than the infant.

In a Canadian study, a woman gave her number to male hikers either just before they reached the Capilano Suspension Bridge or in the middle of the bridge. Those who met her on the bridge were twice as likely to call and ask for a date.

[They explained to me that although things would get a lot better after the body dies, suicide is decisively against the rules.]

What you get, the cobbling together of hundreds of thousands of prior conversations, is a kind of conversational purée. Made of human parts, but less than a human sum. Users are, in effect, chatting with a kind of purée of real people-the ghosts of real people, at any rate: the echoes of conversations past.

We once thought humans were unique for having a language with syntactical rules, but this isn't so; we once thought humans were unique for using tools, but this isn't so; we once thought humans were unique for being able to do mathematics, and now we can barely imagine being able to do what our calculators can.

each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.