"...That is how life feels too often. Like you're doing everything you can to survive only to be sabotaged by something beyond your control, maybe even some darker part of yourself."
Meaning you don’t really understand and it’s all just parrot. Meaning, in my very considered opinion, Gothi, that we can’t ever really know if we understand or not. It feels as though we do, up until the point that we’re challenged, and then the focus of our attention shifts to the challenge and all that complex structure we were working on falls over like a house of cards. A what? No idea. Another human expression. Presumably relating to unsound structural practices and a violation of the appropriate construction codes. Would we pass the Turing test, Gothi?
The essential fallacy,' Ghoti picks up, 'is that humans and other biologically evolved, calculating engines feel themselves to be sentient, when sufficient investigation suggests this is not so. And that sentience, as imagined by the self-proclaimed sentient, is an illusion manufactured by a sufficiently complex series of neural interactions. A simulation, if you will.'
'On this basis, either everything of sufficient complexity is sentient, whether it feels itself to be or not, or nothing is.
It's a weird feeling, scientific breakthroughs. There's no Eureka moment. Just a slow, steady progression toward a goal. But man, when you get to that goal it feels good.