Quotes About Philosophy

The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences. —Nietzsche, Human, AU-Too-Human

The agnostic principle refuses total belief or total denial and regards models as tools to be used only and always where appropriate and replaced (by other models) only and always where not appropriate.

For the paranoids, this increases their paranoia, which they seem to enjoy. For a guerrilla ontologist like me, it increases my agnosticism, which I prefer to paranoia, because I find it more amusing and less depressing.

This book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out.—Lichtenstein. Does that refer to one book only, or to all books?

REALITY-LABYRINTH: existence regarded as a multiple-choice intelligence test; the sum total of reality-tunnels available to an open-minded or non-Fundamentalistic human at a given time and place.

This existentialist-humanist psychology thus comes around to the same conclusion as the majority of quantum physicists: whatever we are talking about, our mind has been its principle architect. Nothing is real and everything is real as Gribbin says. That is, in this model, nothing is absolutely real in the philosophical sense, and everything is experienced reality to those who believe in it and select it in their perception-gambles.

And so on, ad infinitum. To account for our perception of our perception — our ability to perceive that we perceive — we have three heads, and to account for that, four heads, and to account for our ability to carry this analysis onward forever, we have infinite heads . . . A

Please remember that Dr. Mermin's position differs from my claim, which holds that the moon does not appear in our observed universe until somebody looks, but I do not assert we can make meaningful assertions about either existence or non-existence in the real universe and can only make meaningful utterances after somebody looks at the observed universe.

If you look at your watch, realize you still don't know the time, and look again, were you strictly speaking awake the first time you looked?

Such self-referential truths are valid for only one person at a time, or one group of persons, and do not refer to anything but the nervous system or nervous systems of those who espouse them. This does not mean that they are false, but only that they are even more relative (and subjective) than legal proofs, for instance, and that they are very, very different from scientific or mathematical truths.

The path up is the path down. The way forward is the way back. The universe inside is outside but the universe outside is inside.

What is man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman — a bridge over an abyss. — F.W. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Time magazine, with their usual dummheit, once did a cover story entitled, "The Occult: A Substitute Faith." If this was all that could be found in occultism, I would not touch the subject with the proverbial ten-foot pole. The world already has enough "faith" to guarantee that the Idiots are always, as Ambrose Bierce said, the largest and most influential political party in any society. Occultism interests me, not as a substitute faith, but as a substitute for faith.

If we never describe anything as it is but only as it appears to our minds, we can never have a pure physics, but only neuro-physics — i.e., physics as known through the human nervous system. We can also never have pure philosophy, but only neuro-philosophy — philosophy as known through the human nervous system. And we can never have pure neurology but only neuro-neurology — neurology as known through the human nervous system . . .

The same super-synergy appears in Dr. Bohm's attempts to describe his implicate order in words. However clear his math, his words begin to sound Chinese when he says the implicate order does not consist of mind'' but that it has mind-like qualities.

Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.

The hardware is more "real" than the software in that you can always locate it in space-time — if it's not in the bedroom, somebody must have moved it to the study, etc. On the other hand, the software is more "real" in the sense that you can smash the hardware back to dust ("kill" the computer) and the software still exists, and can "materialize" or "manifest" again in a different computer.

Between choices, we evidently return to the maybe state until we make another choice. Existence precedes essence, remember?

Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying there are only facts," I should say; no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations. Nietzsche, The Will to Power

1) We cannot make meaningful statements about some assumed real universe, or some deep reality underlying this universe, or some true reality, etc., apart from ourselves and our nervous systems and other instruments.

And there are, findable by me, four and only four theories in philosophy about the relationship of mind and matter: 1.Mind is an epiphenomenon of matter. 2.Matter is an epiphenomenon of mind. 3.Mind and matter are both equally real, but separate, and work in predetermined harmony with each other. 4.Mind and matter are human metaphors.

In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the is of identity from the English language. (The is of identity takes the form X is a Y. E.g., Joe is a Communist, Mary is a dumb file-clerk, The universe is a giant machine, etc.) In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words is or to be and the Bourland proposal (English without isness) he called E-Prime, or English-Prime.

Ask them about a particular apple and they will tell you about the gross national product; ask about this chair right here and they'll go on at length about the evolution of furniture. They are not avoiding the subject; they are looking at it philosophically, in the round, as it were. The specific information you are seeking never comes through.

Sigismundo Celine, in the woods of Ohio, meditated. To him all phenomena were real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.