Quotes About Philosophy

Si Dios no existe, todo queda permitido.» FIODOR DOSTOIEVSKI

After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.

Brüks had never been entirely clear on what an omniscient being would need a computer for. Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn't diminish the point of the exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.)

Long before art and science and philosophy arose, consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition. In a submerged body starving for air, it's difficult to imagine two imperatives more opposed than the need to breathe and the need to hold your breath. As one Prismatic told me, "Put yourself in one of those things, and tell me you aren't more intensely conscious than you've ever been in your life.

Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Space ship? Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?" I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. "You know what I mean." "It's a meaningless question. Get your head out of the Twentieth Century.

So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own.

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." —Emerson M. Pugh

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Spaceship? Of course. Were they built by naturally evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?

it's not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion. Though

and besides, positing universe as program didn't seem to answer the Big Questions so much as kick them down the road another order of magnitude.

we're hard-core realists—we just pay lip service to death and decay and keep right on feeling immortal anyway.

THE HUMAN BRAIN WERE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULD UNDERSTAND IT, WE WOULD BE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULDN'T. —Emerson M. Pugh

We're the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.

Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.

Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.

For a thousand years this stance would remain central to the art which emerged in the service of Christianity. It is interesting to note too that science, the philosophy of nature pursued by the Greeks, was also allowed to wither in the early Christian era.

Agnostic philosopher Antony O'Hear agrees: 'there are aspects of our experience and existence more fundamental than science, and on which science depends for its possibility. So science cannot be used, as it often is, to undermine those features of our natures.'35 The idea that the mind is 'nothing but' the brain is ultimately a deduction from the assumption of naturalism.

properly basic belief' is any belief that's rational to hold without its being based on any other beliefs

Le monde a l'envers, zise Gogu Apostolescu. Dar st? a?a de un milion de ani.

Ah efendim, dedi, bizi bizden daha iyi biliyorlar; Mesnevi'yi de, Rubiyat'? da, Gazali'yi de, Farabi'yi de bizden daha çok okuyorlar; bizden daha çok takdir ediyorlar; bizim bizden daha büyük dü?man?m?z yoktur efendim, yoktur.