The Mountain in the Sea

The book explores what it means to be intelligent, while also asking: what is culture? What is consciousness? Fitting questions in the age of LLMs.

Notes & Highlights

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”

How we see the world matters—but knowing how the world sees us also matters.

That’s what we are, we humans—creatures that can forget. We have a horizon, beyond which we can remember very little. Nothing can reside in our minds forever, etched into us. No resentment, and no joy. Time rubs it away. Sleep rubs it away—sleep, the factory of forgetting. And through forgetting, we reorganize our world, replace our old selves with new ones.

A philosopher of the twentieth century, Paul Virilio, said: ‘When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.’