Quotes About Reality

Have you ever noticed?--people, no matter how beautiful or desirable, invariably will, if observed closely while going about their daily business of keeping alive, begin to seem like monsters.

I think most observance is really more a way of conceptualizing day-to-day life as what it actually is for many people, a progress of meaningful failures.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

Why are we fighting them? --They're mad. We're sane. --How do we know? --That we're sane? --Yes. --Am I sane? --To all appearances. --And you, do you consider yourself sane? --I do. --Well, there you have it. --But don't they also consider themselves sane? --I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane. --How must that make them feel? --Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.

We are what and where we are because we have first imagined it.

This critique also misreads the Copernican revolution. Yes, our perceptions misled us about our place in the universe. But its deeper message is this: our perceptions can mislead us about the very nature of the universe itself. We are prone to falsely believe that certain limitations and idiosyncrasies of our perceptions are genuine insights into objective reality.

To construct is the essence of vision. Dispense with construction and you dispense with vision. Everything you experience by sight is your construction.

as Einstein put it 'Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.31 To earn its keep, conscious realism must do serious work ahead. It must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology.

There are as many cubes as there are observers constructing cubes. And when you look away, your cube ceases to be.

If you play a video game on your computer, such as "Doom" or "Uncharted", you see compelling 3D worlds with 3D objects. Yet the information is entirely 2D, limited by the number of pixels on the screen. The same is true when you look away from your computer to the world around you. It too has pixels, and all the information is 2D.

The math is not the territory.

Hence our decline of insight as we shift our gaze from human to ant to quark. Our decline of insight should not be mistaken for an insight into decline—a progressive poverty inherent in objective reality. The decline is in our interface, in our perceptions. But we externalize it; we pin it on reality. Then we erect, from this erroneous reification, an ontology of physicalism.

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: "We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."36

Nathan Seiberg of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton said, "I am almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.

A glimpse of an eye is, for purposes of triggering the animate-monitoring system, a glimpse of the beast peering through that eye.

Which raises a perplexing question: What about the big bang? Didn't it happen 13 billion 799 million years ago, before any observers?

Physics and evolution point to the same conclusion: spacetime and objects are not foundational. Something else is more fundamental, and spacetime emerges from it.

What we call 'reality,' consists of an elaborate papier-mâché construction of imagination and theory filled in between a few iron posts of observation."22 We

Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.

Once we know the rules that human vision uses to decode messages about fitness, we can use those rules to send the messages we want. Consider jeans.

For principled reasons, Einstein's spacetime cannot be foundational in physics

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: "We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.