Quotes About Perception

Let us always remember Abraham Lincoln's undeservedly neglected riddle: How many legs has a dog got if you call a tail a leg? The answer, said Lincoln, and he was right, is four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.

Reality is that which, when you don't believe in it, doesn't go away.

While a facilitator, detective magazines or porn on their own do not necessarily make people into serial killers.

She did not kill anyone, Perry insisted, because at the time of the 1990 murders, "Donna" did not exist. Whatever evidence the police had was associated with Douglas Perry, her former male incarnation.

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. —MARK TWAIN

For many scientists, as Lyotard concedes, scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge there is, but if so, how then do we understand fairy stories and law?

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones.

Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.

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

I think I'll call you Cygnus," Chelsea said. "The swan?" I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse. She shook her head. "Black hole. Cygnus X-1.

You can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

If you can see it, chances are it doesn't exist.

Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort.

Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view's distorted.

Let's just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.

She can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.

Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.

we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.

you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain.

They never experience the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it.

You said it was colorful. What changed?" "I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just— I don't actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more." "So how do you know you still have them?" Pag asked. Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. "I know." "How?" I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered. "I wake up smiling," I said.

Brüks digested that. "Well, if it was supposed to be some kind of compliment, her delivery needs work. You'd think someone with all that brainpower would be able to cobble together a few social skills." "Funny thing"—Moore's voice was expressionless—"Sengupta couldn't figure out how someone with all your interpersonal skills could be so shitty at math.

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.