Quotes About Uncertainty

Worse yet, scientific models, like people and cattle and insect species and mountains and all things known, have a lifespan. Mountains may survive geological eras, but scientific maps, like people and birds, have short lives. None has ever lasted more than a few hundred years, at present. To believe in any such mask with the fervor of Gross and Levitt contradicts all known facts of scientific history. Every theory they worship will someday get junked.

1) until the future arrives, the outcome is uncertain, so Doomsday scenarios, however popular, are not definitive and, for intellectual honesty and clarity, deserve to be criticized and challenged;

It's possible that a meteor will come hurtling in from outer space and wipe out this whole city." And so on. The neutral and objective view that covered any other experience in Holy Out's life just couldn't reach the area of the first shot; that was permanently buried under everything he had ever read about the causes of deviant behavior.

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).

Against the paranoia that easily infests either Establishment dogma and anti-Establishment dogma, the only defense I see is agnosticism, well-flavored with a sense of humor, and an awareness of one's own fallibility. I suspect a great deal, but as long as Government Secrets exist, I am not sure of anything.

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 seems to me that existence — at this point I have doubts about the universe — is a lot like a Rorschach ink-blot. Everybody looks at it and sees their own favorite reality-tunnel.

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

In general, people judge it manly to pronounce dogmatic verdicts and fight for them, and to admit quantum uncertainty (von Neumann's maybe) seems unmanly. Feminism often challenges this machismo, but, just as often, certain Feminists appear to think they will appear stronger if they speak and behave as dogmatically and unscientifically as the stupidest, most macho males.

If you think about it from the perspective of E-Prime, the world consists mostly of UFOs and UNFOs. Very few things (space-time events) in the air or on the ground give us the opportunity to identify them with certainty.

If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit.

The information in a message equals the negative of the probabilities that you can predict what will come next every step of the way. The easier you can predict a message, the less information the message contains.

I avoid making sentences with "is" or its relatives in them because all such sentences have definite semantic defects, the first of which consists in the fact that they make it appear as if one has reached the unreachable 1/1 of proven truth, when in fact one usually only has strong maybe, and (especially in politics and Ideology) sometimes only a weak maybe.

George has other reasons. "A junkie," George says, "has no choice. He's hooked. But somebody who isn't an addict, somebody who has the freedom to say 'yes' or 'no,' has to be crazy to take a pill or powder admittedly manufactured illegally and put it in his mouth. There is just no way of knowing what you're getting.

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.

Yes, it was mass hallucination. No, it was not mass hallucination. Maybe it was mass hallucination.

Einstein's favorite line of criticism revolved around his claim that Quantum Mechanics, as known then (and as still known) may not constitute a complete theory of the subatomic realm. In ordinary language, this means that the Uncertainty and Indeterminacy of quantum equations — however useful these equations prove every day in technology — contains a possible hole through which an entirely new Quantum Theory may someday march.

Transactional Psychology, based largely on the pioneering research concerning human perception conducted at Princeton University in the 1940s by Albert Ames, agrees with all the above systems that we cannot know any abstract Truth but only relative truths (small t, plural) derived from our gambles as our brain makes models of the ocean of new signals it receives every second.

We are passing through Chaos but we will not end in Chaos. We still have a starry destiny ahead of us

The only escape from this trap, as far as I can see, is to be skeptical about one's own skepticism: which is what I mean by the New Agnosticism.

fact allegedly exists; a non-fact allegedly doesn't exist. But existence is something we can never know all about. It is a term in metaphysics, not in operational science.

A fact allegedly exists; a non-fact allegedly doesn't exist. But existence is something we can never know all about. It is a term in metaphysics, not in operational science.

Just as a hologram is so structured that each part contains the whole, Finnegans Wake is structured in puns and synchronicities that contain and reflect each other, creating the closest approximation of an infinite regress ever achieved in any art-form. The absent is everpresent, the dead are all alive, and the abyss of uncertainty appears in every multi-meaningful sentence. (This will be illustrated below.)

We never find out how many of the people "framed" by Quinlan actually committed the crimes for which he framed them — just as we never find out the definite position of a quantum particle, or how many Picassos we should really call Elmyrs. Post-modernism does not result from whim, but from growing evidence that we simply do not live in an Aristotelian true/false universe. As UMMO says, we live with a middle (or muddle) excluded by Aristotle.