Quotes from Steven J. Dick

We are deciphering how all known objects—from atoms to galaxies, from cells to brains, from people to society—are interrelated. For the more we examine nature, the more everything seems related to everything else.

The increased awareness of the new universe and the possibility of a biological universe largely dashed any remaining hopes for an anthropocentric universe with all that implies for religion and philosophy.

As the God of the ancient Near East stemmed from ideas of supernaturalism, our concept of a modern God could stem from modern ideas divorced from supernaturalism. [...] A natural God need not intervene in human history, nor be the cause for religious wars such as witnessed through human history.

We all have a remarkable capacity to slot our observations into preconceived frameworks, and act accordingly. In other words, our intellectual models of contact generate history as surely as they recount it.

Our technology, art, and what we know of our world, is unspeakably exhilarating and terrifyingly dangerous. We are capable of powerful creations and complete annihilation. Our consciousness is uncontainable—to the point of agonizing awareness. Homo sapiens sapiens has a power unlike Earth has ever seen.

But exaltation of humanity in no way justifies unchecked devotion at the expense of others who inhabit our world and perhaps worlds beyond.

A]n increasing number of people around the world are seeing their place for the first time within this naturalistic worldview. This recognition represents for humanity a return to the cosmos, a more sophisticated integration of culture and cosmos that humans possessed when cultures began, ranging from Stonehenge and the ancient civilizations such as Sumer and Egypt to Native Americans and the Australian aborigines.

T]hink about culture as the collective manifestation of value—where value is that which is valuable to "sufficiently complex" agents, from which meaning, purpose, ethics, and aesthetics can be derived.

T]he entire universe is evolving, [...] all of its parts are connected and interact, and [...] this evolution applies not only to inert matter, but also to life, intelligence, and culture. Physical, biological, and cultural evolution is the essence of the universe.

T]he details of a culture should not be reduced down to straightforward patterns or sequences because the details—the intricacies of human lives—are the point. Often we seek to understand people in their own right, and on their own terms rather than from an external perspective.

Although the past really happened—in the same way that the world is indeed out there—history is something we make.

At minimum, there may be an implication that one of the great challenges for intelligent cultural beings may be to learn to cope with, and perhaps finally accept, a profound and deep sense of uncertainty regarding any larger cosmic sense of meaning and purpose—that such an uncertainty may have to be treated as a kind of empirical question to be possibly addressed over very long time periods as evidence is accumulated, but perhaps without ever obtaining a satisfactory answer.

Coping with the uncertainty of larger cosmic objective meaning may be one of the most profound challenges sufficiently aware beings have to face [...]. Indeed, human beings might be further along in this regard than may be commonly thought—much of the human population seems to able to cope without religion and without a larger sense of cosmic meaning and purpose.

Culture is the multigenerational hard-drive of memory, change, and innovation. Culture transforms a record of the past into a prediction of the future; it transforms memory into tradition — into rules of how to proceed. And culture is profoundly social. It exists not just in one mind, but binds together mobs of minds in a common enterprise.

Without knowing the full extent of the past, we have no idea whether the events we can see are typical of larger patterns or simply contingent products of particular eras, societies, or conjunctures. A statistician might say that the sample from which historians generalize is seriously skewed for the simple reason that we have no idea how or by how much it is skewed! If that is true, it makes all the larger generalizations of historians suspect.

A lack of "external" objective meaning may be unsatisfying to many—caught forever in endless cycles of relativism, a morass of unbearable responsibility for our own meaning and purpose, and perhaps ultimately for that of the universe. But it looks like choice is inescapable. And while choice can sometimes be oppressive and debilitating, it is also liberating and empowering[.]

Emergent properties can seem magical because they do not seem to arise from the component parts of a structure. [...] Thought [...] seems to be an emergent property of the organization of neurons in brains. [...] "Emergent properties" arise from a particular arrangement of components—they do not appear within the component parts themselves.

Indeed, we humans bear witness to the process of evolution in the very composition of our bodies. The calcium that gives solidity to our bones, the iron that lets our blood carry oxygen to our brains, the sodium and potassium that make possible the transmission of impulses along our nerves, all of these elements were formed inside a star that had its own birth and life and death, hurling its remains outward in a supernova explosion billions of years ago.

We need not assume our universe is in essence "computational," "alive," or even "hierarchically dissipative," only that these computational, organic, and thermodynamic analogies may serve to advance our understanding of processes far more complex than our models.

Yes, we humans are more than merely biological creatures. We appreciate beauty, we struggle with ethical conflicts, and we strive to make sense of our purpose in the universe, asking questions that science cannot answer. And yet, our sense of aesthetics, our moral sensibilities, and our search for meaning may themselves be intricately connected to the fabric of the cosmos.

The key shortcoming of the multiverse theory, however, is that it appeals to something outside the universe, namely, a vast ensemble of other universes and a set of meta-laws that exist for no reason (e.g., quantum mechanics, string theory). In this respect, the multiverse theory is little better than a direct theistic explanation where an appeal is made to an external creator/designer.

That the epic journey of Homo sapiens has taken us from the savannah to space is indisputable, but we do not have one simple, comprehensive account of this multigenerational sojourn—and we never will, no matter how much we excavate. Rather, we have grainy snapshots, faded sketches, souvenirs of mysterious purpose, maps of unspecified scales drawn long after the fact, and stories which change with each storyteller and occasion.

Reality, truth, and knowledge are matters about which there is less consensus than one might hope.

Culture influences our understanding of the world. Our biological perception equipment is influenced by our mental constructions; we do not simply 'see the world as it is,' either in the literal sense of vision or in the metaphorical sense of overall apprehension. Our explanations for the patterns we observe are produced in part by what we are taught about the rules of causation, i.e., 'how the world works.