Quotes About Philosophy

A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist's mind before he or she begins to do science.

Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion? Juanita shrugs.—What's the difference?

To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calendar, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living document.

Gedankenexperiment

no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand-grains in a beach that in essence never changes.

that he lived in a universe whose complexity defied algorithmic simulation.

Se podían haber planteado todo tipo de argumentos filosóficos sobre si ese enfoque era mejor o peor que lo que estaban haciendo en realidad, pero, en el fondo, la filosofía no contaba demasiado.

These people cared about eternal truths. Believed that some—but not all—such truths were written down in a book. That their book was right and the others wrong. This much they had in common with most of the other people who had ever lived.

This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?

the old world, death had led to endless philosophical ruminations and spawned religions, but in Bitworld it led to one-star ratings from furious bereaved and threats of class-action lawsuits.

The Sadducees were materialists." "Meaning what? They drove BMWs?

Avi thinks this over before issuing the carefully engineered statement: "It is as true as it ever was.

To shave off the beard (or any body hair) is to symbolically annihilate the (essentially specious) boundary separating Self from Other

Pascal's Wager?" asked Dr. Trinh. "Pascal once said that you should believe in God because, if you turned out to be wrong, you weren't losing anything, and if you turned out to be right, the reward was infinite," Corvallis said.

In fact, I would probably sound like a seventeenth-century alchemist or something.

The question, as always, is whether the organizing principle is added to the gross matter to animate it, as yeast is thrown into beer, or inheres in the relationships among the parts themselves.

if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than Alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago

There is a saying, 'Turtles all the way down,' which I would not expect you to understand, but the point of it is that to speculate along these lines is idle

You're saying that my consciousness extends across multiple cosmi," I said. "That's a pretty wild statement.

Pascal once said that you should believe in God because, if you turned out to be wrong, you weren't losing anything, and if you turned out to be right, the reward was infinite

if Newton is the finger, Leibniz is the stone, and they press against each other with equal and opposite force, a little bit harder every day. RAVENSCAR:

In the old world, death had led to endless philosophical ruminations and spawned religions, but in Bitworld it led to one-star ratings from furious bereaved and threats of class-action lawsuits.

Now, if you—the ingenious Dr. Leibniz—contrive a machine that gives the impression of thinking—is it really thinking, or merely reflecting your genius?" "You could as well have asked: are we thinking? Or merely reflecting God's genius?

All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral—a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next.