Quotes About Philosophy

2) for the reasons sketched above, and developed more fully in the text to follow, I do not think pessimism is the only possible outlook on the universe, but merely the one that is currently ubiquitous;

UMMO differs from Meier and the other cults in one very significant way. All of the other outer space messages peddled by "contactees" have low-to-zero information content.* They say nothing new. They have all the philosophic, scientific and literary value of Hallmark cards.

O ceticismo em um grau elevado é um lugar estimulante para ser visitado (por um romancista), mas certamente não desejo viver lá.

In Standard English we may discuss all sorts of metaphysical and spooky matters, often without noticing that we have entered the realms of theology and demonology, whereas in English Prime we can only discuss actual experiences (or transactions) in the space-time continuum. English Prime may not automatically transfer us into a scientific universe, in all cases, but it at least transfers us into existential or experiential modes, and takes us out of medieval theology.

Personally, I don't trust mystic experiences, including my own — although I seek them and enjoy them. I think Altered Consciousness offers new ways of perceiving/conceiving and should start philosophical investigation, not stop it.

Quantum Mechanics says an electron has a different essence every time we measure it (or, more clearly, it has no essence at all). Neuroscience reveals, similarly, that the Mary we meet on Tuesday may have a different self than the Mary we met Monday (or, as the Buddhists said long before neuroscience, Mary has no essence at all).

As we said at the beginning, the bedrock claim of existentialism holds that existence precedes essence, or we have no essence. Like electrons, we jump from one information system to another, and only those who have not looked closely believe that one essence remains constant through all transformations.

This may surprise many, including the physicists who claim that quantum uncertainty only applies to the subatomic world and that in ordinary affairs we still live in a Newtonian universe. This book dares to disagree with that accepted wisdom; I take exactly the opposite position. My endeavor here will attempt to show that the celebrated problems and paradoxes and the general philosophical enigmas of the quantum world appear also in daily life.

It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. — Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

That's what makes you unhappy," Marcie said. "You ask too many questions.

What the skeptic really seems to be claiming is that he knows what the subject feels better than the subject knows – i.e., that the subject doesn't feel what he feels but feels something else. This is the kind of verbal metaphysics that made the medieval theologians become the laughing-stocks of Voltaire and other rationalist critics.

Words do not equal in space-time the things or events they denote, yet people react to a choice between words as if making a choice between real things or events in the existential world.

Can we begin to ask "how much truth does this book contain?" or "how much fiction does this book contain?" instead of the Aristotelian "Is it true or false?

Around the world today are millions living in the Marxist reality-tunnel, the vegetarian reality-tunnel, the Buddhist reality-tunnel, the nudist reality-tunnel, the monetarist reality-tunnel, the Methodist reality-tunnel, the Zionist reality-tunnel, the Polynesian totemistic reality-tunnel etc.

It is accepted by all schools of philosophy that the world presents only appearances to us. Facts are deduced from the appearances, according to the various factions, by PR (pure reason) or by a combination of PR and SD (sense data) in tandem, or by PR and SD aided and abetted by creative intuition, but in any case, they are deduced, not given. Hume and Nietzsche seem to be alone in claiming that what is called a fact is just another appearance which somebody has decided to believe is a fact.

When we get down to sub-atomic or quantum level we encounter the model agnosticism I have been presenting. We have not one model but several; and we have also a widespread opinion that having more than one model may not be a fault or defect but a useful procedure in freeing up creative energies. We arrive — at least temporarily, and maybe permanently — at multi-model agnosticism rather than one-model Fundamentalism.

1. We can say it is waves. 2. We can say it is particles. 3. We can say it is both waves and particles, i.e. either of the first two will serve, at different times. 4. We can say It is neither waves nor particles, i.e. the models are our metaphors; the Etic non-verbal event remains — unspeakable.

This, of course, is the traditional Buddhist logic — It is X, it is not-X, it is both X and not-X, it is neither X nor not-X

To Buddhist Tibet, this is the unity of yab and yum; to Taoist China, the unity of yin and yang. The Occident perennially seeks to repress this thought, and perennially is haunted by half-awareness of it.

If by some miracle I have managed to make sense out of this issue, where physicists themselves seem to have trouble understanding one another, the basic point of Copenhagenism seems to be similar to my own Nietzschean-existentialist view that the nonverbal or preverbal world never contained meters or kilograms or ergs of energy or photons or good or evil or beauty or meaning until primate nervous systems (human minds) put them there as systems of classification.

We begin to realize that, once these issues are raised, it doesn't really matter whether a man believes in God or not. God, after all, is just a short-hand symbol for our attitude toward the nature of the universe.

In Buddhist Logic, then: Social fields are real. Social fields are not real. Social fields are both real and not-real. Social fields are neither real nor not-real.

It is even more amusing to remember that an orange is really sort of blue in the model accepted in optical physics. That is, the fruit has absorbed blue — blue is conducted through its skin. We see orange precisely because there is no orange in the fruit — because orange is being reflected off the skin, to our eyes. The substance or isness of the fruit contains the blue we do not see; our brains contain the orange we do see.

According to Alfred Korzybski, any "idea" or mental state is a brain circuit which the brain itself can contemplate, thereby having an idea about the idea, or a mental state about the mental state, etc. There is no theoretical or real limit to the higher-ordering process; it is the "Infinity Within" of which mystics speak.