Quotes About Philosophy

Ideas matter—and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.

Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.

Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying attention to what it is actually like to be what we are. The moment we do pay attention, we begin to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our subjectivity is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and actions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.

There will always be some delay between the first neuropsychological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if they weren't — even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states — I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know — it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?

Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck. Is

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious.

Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion

Where is the freedom in being perfectly satisfied with your thoughts, intentions, and subsequent actions when they are the product of prior events that you had absolutely no hand in creating?

Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: "Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.

If your denial of death is sufficiently explicit and persuasive that you believe death isn't real, then what you deny isn't death but the significance of life.

Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is denial - at once full of hope and full of fear - of the vastitude of human ignorance.

In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence.

Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy.

Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature—to say nothing of killing and dying for them—would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?

Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms. This is undoubtedly one of the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate.

the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence for His existence, but that faith in Him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance.

Consciousness is the one thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion--even if I'm a brain in a vat, all my memories are false, and my perceptions are of a world that doesn't exist, I'm still having an experience.

Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we have exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.

There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life.

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist.

There's something it's like for me to see the green leaves outside my window right now, so that's a conscious state to me. But there may be some unconscious language-processing going on in my head that doesn't feel like anything to me, or some motor processes in the cerebellum. Those might be states of me, but they're not conscious states of me, because there's nothing it's like for me to undergo those states.

An atheist is a person who believes that the murder of a single little girl—even once in a million years—casts doubt upon the idea of a benevolent God.

I take seriously the idea that we're in a simulation. I have no idea whether or not it's true, but if it is, if we are in a simulation, it's not that nothing is real, not that there are no tables and chairs and trees. Rather, it's that they exist in a different form from what we first thought. There's a level of computation underneath what we take to be physical reality.

One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do.