Quotes About Reality

So. The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality. At

But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke's liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one's looking.

What do you think vision is?" she asked him. "You don't see a fraction of the things that surround you, and at least half the things you do see are deceptive. Hell, color doesn't even exist outside your own head. Vision's just plain wrong; it only persists because it works. If you're going to dismiss the idea of God, you better stop believing your own eyes in the bargain.

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.

Brain's got all kinds of gauges. You can know you're blind even when you're not; you can know you can see, even when you're blind. And yeah, you can know you don't exist even when you do. It's a long list, commissar. Cotard's, Anton's, Damascus disease. Just for starters.

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.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness.

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

How do you know? Maybe you're just out of the loop, maybe those orthogonal stealthnets are running you the way you think you're running Rakshi. You think everyone on the planet's a puppet except for Colonel Jim Moore?

A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half asses way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on try. We focus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back

people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You

YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH, AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU MAD. —Aldous Huxley

The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality .

Digital physics had reigned supreme since before he'd been born, and its dictums were as incontrovertible as they were absurd. Numbers didn't just describe reality; numbers were reality, discrete step functions smoothing up across the Planck length into an illusion of substance.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. There have always been those tasked with the rotation of informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had little to do with increasing its clarity.

people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy.

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

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

Comforting lies get far too easy with practice.

Like to hear a vampire folk tale?" Sarasti asked. "Vampires have folk tales?" He took it for a yes. "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.

REALITY IS THAT WHICH, WHEN YOU STOP BELIEVING IN IT, DOESN'T GO AWAY. —PHILIP K. DICK

TRY TO TOUCH THE PAST. TRY TO DEAL WITH THE PAST. IT'S NOT REAL. IT'S JUST A DREAM. —Ted Bundy

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