Quotes About Philosophy

Where are these quanta of space? Nowhere. They are not in space because they are themselves the space. Space is created by the linking of these individual quanta of gravity. Once again, the world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships.

Why do we remember the past and not the future? Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us? What does it really mean to say that time "passes"? What ties time to our nature as persons, to our subjectivity? What am I listening to when I listen to the passing of time?

The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.

There is no ultimate or mysterious essence to understand that is the true essence of our being.

The notion of "particularity" is born only at the moment we begin to see the universe in a blurred and approximate way.

We often say that causes precede effects and yet, in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between "cause" and "effect."* There

I think that quantum mechanics has revealed three aspects of the nature of things: granularity, indeterminacy, and the relational structure of the world.

Or does it mean, as it seems to me, that we must accept the idea that reality is only interaction?

When we seek a sure foundation on which to base decisions about our actions and thoughts, we find that a sure foundation does not exist. We do not even know whether we actually need such a foundation. We continue to make use of vague, uncertain ideas, precisely in those areas that most deeply concern us. What we call "irrational" is the code name for what we don't understand well about ourselves given the limits of our own intelligence.

The present is like the flatness of Earth: an illusion. We

Democritus himself, who had placed empty space at the basis of his world where atoms course, certainly wasn't crystal clear on the issue: he wrote that empty space is something "between being and non-being":

For Plato, forms exist by themselves, in an ethereal ideal world of forms, a world of "ideas." The idea of a horse exists prior to and independently of any actual horse. For Plato, a real horse is nothing but a pale reflection of the idea of a horse. The atoms that make up the horse count for little: what counts is the "horseness," the abstract form.

This is also true from a methodological point of view: a scientist orients his own research on the basis of epistemological ideas. He might be more or less aware of them. Very often to be aware of your own assumptions is far better than to be guided by methodological prejudices of which you are unaware.

The difference between past and future, between cause and effect, between memory and hope, between regret and intention . . . in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.

I think that the obscurity of the theory is not the fault of quantum mechanics but is rather due to the limited capacity of our imagination. When we try to "see" the quantum world, we are rather like moles used to living underground, to whom someone is trying to describe the Himalayas. Or like the men imprisoned at the back of Plato's cave.

Only where there is heat is there a distinction between past and future.

Only where there is heat is there a distinction between past and future. Thoughts, for instance, unfold from the past to the future, not vice versa—and, in fact, thinking produces heat in our heads. . . .

We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this inmense, chaotic universe.

A novel image of the world is taking shape: a world without space and without time. The space where the world "inhabits" and the time "along which" things evolve might soon disappear from our fundamental description of the physical world, in the same manner in which notions such as "the centre of the universe" have disappeared in the past.

To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves.

Why do we remember the past and not the future?

If the present has no meaning, then what "exists" in the universe? Is not what "exists" precisely what is here "in the present"?

we are nothing but images of images. Reality, including our selves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which . . . there is nothing.

Hollandal? felsefeci Baruch Spinoza'n?n 17. yüzy?lda müthi? bir sa?duyuyla anlad??? gibi, bu ikisi ayn? ?eydir. "Ben" ve "beynimdeki nöronlar" diye iki ayr? ?ey yoktur. Bu ikisi ayn?d?r. Bir birey, karma??k ama s?k? s?k?ya bütünle?ik bir süreçtir.