QUOTATIONS #3

Mark Twain --: All democrats are insane, but not one of them knows it; none but the republicans and mugwumps know it. All the republicans are insane, but only the democrats and mugwumps can perceive it. The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Gottfried Leibnitz --: There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contigent and their opposites are possible.

Democritus --: Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

Oswald Spengler --: I maintain that today many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology.

Arthur Schopenhauer --: Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.

George Berkeley --: All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind.

Stephen Jay Gould --: 'Creation science' has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage - good teaching - than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?

William James --: Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true, by events.

Julian Barbour --: I suggest that our belief in time and a past arises solely because our entire experience comes to us through the medium of static arrangements of matter, in Nows, that create the appearance of time and change.

Max Tegmark --: ...the evolution of the wave function corresponds to a never-ending sliding from one of these 10 to the 10^118 states to another. Now you are in universe A, the one in which you are reading this sentence. Now you are in universe B, the one in which you are reading this other sentence. Put differently, universe B has an observer identical to one in universe A, except with an extra instant of memories. All possible states exist at every instant, so the passage of time may be in the eye of the beholder--an idea explored in Greg Egan's 1994 science-fiction novel Permutation City and developed by physicist David Deutsch of the University of Oxford, independent physicist Julian Barbour, and others. The multiverse framework may thus prove essential to understanding the nature of time. [Parallel Universes]

Agent Smith --: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. ... As a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.

Charles S. Peirce --: ...that mind into which the minds of utterer and interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication should take place ... may be called the commens. It consists of all that is, and must be, well understood between utterer and interpreter, at the outset, in order that the sign in question should fulfill its function.

Parmenides --: It is both necessary to say and think that being is: for to be is possible, and nothingness is not possible.

Richard Dawkins --: To this day, and in quarters where they should know better, Darwinism is widely regarded as a theory of 'chance'. It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work. You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch. Only God would essay the mad task of leaping up the precipice in a single bound. And if we postulate him as our cosmic designer we are left in exactly the same position as when we started. Any Designer capable of constructing the dazzling array of living things would have to be intelligent and complicated beyond all imagining. And complicated is just another word for improbable - and therefore demanding of explanation. A theologian who ripostes that his god is sublimely simple has (not very) neatly evaded the issue, for a sufficiently simple god, whatever other virtues he might have, would be too simple to be capable of designing a universe (to say nothing of forgiving sins, answering prayers, blessing unions, transubstantiating wine, and the many other achievements variously expected of him). You cannot have it both ways. Either your god is capable of designing worlds and doing all the other godlike things, in which case he needs an explanation in his own right. Or he is not, in which case he cannot provide an explanation. God should be seen by Fred Hoyle as the ultimate Boeing 747. The height of Mount Improbable stands for the combination of perfection and improbability that is epitomized in eyes and enzyme molecules (and gods capable of designing them). To say that an object like an eye or a protein molecule is improbable means something rather precise. The object is made of a large number of parts arranged in a very special way. The number of possible ways in which those parts could have been arranged is exceedingly large. In the case of a protein molecule we can actually calculate that large number. Isaac Asimov did it for the particular protein haemoglobin, and called it the Haemoglobin Number. It has 190 noughts. That is the number of ways of rearranging the bits of haemoglobin such chat the result would not be haemoglobin. In the case of the eye we can't do the equivalent calculation without fabricating lots of assumptions, but we can intuitively see that it is going to come to another stupefyingly large number. The actual, observed arrangement of parts is improbable in the sense that it is only one arrangement among trillions of possible arrangements. Now, there is an uninteresting sense in which, with hindsight, any particular arrangement of parts is just as improbable as any other. Even a junkyard is as improbable, with hindsight, as a 747, for its Parts could have been arranged in so many other ways. The trouble is, most of those ways would also be junkyards. This is where the idea of quality comes in. The vast majority of arrangements of the parts of a Boeing junkyard would not fly. A small minority would. Of all the trillions of possible arrangements of the parts of an eye, only a tiny minority would see. The human eye forms a sharp image on a retina, corrected for spherical and chromatic aberration; automatically stops down or up with an iris diaphragm to keep the internal light intensity relatively constant in the face of large fluctuations in external light intensity; automatically changes the focal length of the lens depending upon whether the object being looked at is near or far; sorts out colour by comparing the firing rates of three different kinds of light-sensitive cell. Almost all random scramblings of the parts of an eye would fail to achieve any of these delicate and difficult tasks. There is something very special about the particular arrangement that exists. All particular arrangements are as improbable as each other. But of all particular arrangements, those that aren't useful hugely outnumber those that are. Useful devices are improbable and need a special explanation. This is another way of saying that objects such as these cannot be explained as coming into existence by chance. As we have seen, to invoke chance, on its own, as an explanation, is equivalent to vaulting from the bottom to the top of Mount Improbable's steepest cliff in one bound. And what corresponds to inching up the kindly, grassy slopes on the other side of the mountain? It is the slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants that Darwin called natural selection. The metaphor of Mount Improbable dramatizes the mistake of the sceptics quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Where they went wrong was to keep their eyes fixed on the vertical precipice and its dramatic height. They assumed that the sheer cliff was the only way up to the summit on which are perched eyes and protein molecules and other supremely improbable arrangements of parts. It was Darwin's great achievement to discover the gentle gradients winding up the other side of the mountain. [Climbing Mount Improbable]

Willard Quine --: Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.

Edward O. Wilson --: The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure.

Friedrich Nietzsche --: Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Richard Dawkins --: In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Tim McLaughlin --: If it is true that the purpose of individual memory is to survive the death of the moment, then it is equally true that the purpose of collective memory is to survive the death of the individual.

Cypher --: You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.

Popular Mechanics article in 1950 describing how the world would be 50 years later:: [In 2000] nobody has yet circumnavigated the moon in a rocket space ship, but the idea is not laughed down.

Carl Sagan --: But the tools of skepticism are generally unavailable to the citizens of our society. They're hardly ever mentioned in the schools, even in the presentation of science, its most ardent practitioner, although skepticism repeatedly sprouts spontaneously out of the disappointments of everyday life. Our politics, economics, advertising, and religions (New Age and Old) are awash in credulity. Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a skeptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging skepticism.

George Berkeley --: By experiments of sense we become acquainted with the lower faculties of the soul; and from them, whether by a gradual evolution or ascent, we arrive at the highest. Sense supplies images to memory. These become subjects for fancy to work upon. Reason considers and judges of the imaginations. And these acts of reason become new objects to the understanding. In this scale, each lower faculty is a step that leads to one above it. And the uppermost naturally leads to the Deity; which is ra ther the object of intellectual knowledge than even of the discursive faculty, not to mention the sensitive. There runs a Chain throughout the whole system of beings. In this Chain one link drags another. The meanest things are connected with the highest.

William Blake --: The essentials to happiness are something to love, something to do, and something to hope for.

William Blake --: If the doors of perception were to be cleansed man would see everything as it truly is... Infinite.

William Blake --: To see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.

Maria Spiropulu --: Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but they're not entitled to their own facts. The data is the data.

Craig Loehle --: What would have happened if Darwin and Einstein as young men had needed to apply for government support? Their probability of getting past the grant reviewers would be similar to a snowball surviving in Hell.

Arthur Custance --: It is important to distinguish a "novelty," which arises suddenly but has its origin within an existing system, from a "new thing" which has been introduced from outside the system. The first is something de novo, the latter is something ex nihilo.

Since science cannot deal successfully with the latter, the idea of outright creation is not allowable. Within the framework of scientific thinking an object which is claimed to be ex nihilo is suspect, and a determined effort will be made to show how it can be derived from what already exists, however complex and novel it may appear to be. If mind arises de novo as an entirely new thing in nature, perhaps as the result of a mutation of some kind, it is nevertheless assumed that it is to be derived directly from what is already in existence. The idea of something new which has appeared ex nihilo, that is to say, out of nothing, is most unwelcome in the present climate of scientific thought.

We therefore have two basic views about the origin of mindedness, one of which is acceptable in spite of the mystery surrounding it, because it is derived out of existing matter. This is termed monism. The other view, which sees it as a direct creation, not derived out of existing matter but "out of nothing,'' is termed dualism. It is not scientifically respectable.

We may, however, make a further division of the subject by recognizing that within the strictly monistic view mindedness might arise de novo in two different ways. It might arise by slow emergence until it suddenly becomes recognizable as mindedness. Or it might appear by a single leap as soon as the complexity of the brain had reached a certain critical stage. The first is a gradual formation of a mindedness that was "always there" but at such a low level as not to be recognizable. This is the position of panpsychism, which holds that all matter has mindedness. The second is a sudden appearance of mindedness which thereafter has an existence in its own right, but born of existing matter nevertheless.

Dualism can also be conceived as occurring in two ways, mindedness may be introduced ex nihilo in kind of embryonic form which does not reveal itself until a certain stage of organic development has been reached. Or it is introduced ex nihilo only when the advanced stage of development has been completed. Thus, although we have four alternatives, they can be viewed as two: monism and dualism. We may thus say that mindedness arose because matter contained within itself the potential for it; or we may say that it was introduced by some means external to matter.

Either view presents a dilemma which has been recognized for a long time. In one case we must say that even atoms have potential mindedness--a circumstance which is difficult to conceive. Or we have the direct creation of something out of nothing--which is equally difficult to conceive. We face a hard choice.

Arthur C. Clarke --: My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.

Arthur C. Clarke --: You will find men like him in all of the world's religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistance of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.

Arthur C. Clarke --: I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.

Arthur C. Clarke --: A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

Bertrand Russell --: In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

Werner Heisenberg --: It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet. These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human nature, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions: hence if they actually meet, that is, if they are at least so much related to each other that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that new and interesting developments may follow.

Emily Dickinson --: The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will contain,
With ease, and you, beside.

Sapolsky's Third Law --: Often, the biggest impediment to scientific progress is not what we don't know, but what we know.

Raymond E. Feist --: Never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz --: Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in a simple substance, and not in a compound or in a machine, that perception must be sought for.

D. R. Khashaba --: The solipsism that refuses to acknowledge other intelligent human beings simply because the solipsist cannot pop into other people's brains, is only a particular form of solipsism. It is also solipsism to refuse to see intelligent activity in nature because the constitution of nature is not analogous to our own.

David Deutsch --: When a quantum computer delivers the output of such a computation, we shall know that those intermediate results must have been computed somewhere, because they were needed to produce the right answer. So I issue this challenge to those who still cling to a single-universe world view: if the universe we see around us is all there is, where are quantum computations performed? I have yet to receive a plausible reply.

Thomas Jefferson --: Every society has a right to fix the fundamental principles of its association, and to say to all individuals, that if they contemplate pursuits beyond the limits of these principles and involving dangers which the society chooses to avoid, they must go somewhere else for their exercise; that we want no citizens, and still less ephemeral and pseudo-citizens, on such terms. We may exclude them from our territory, as we do persons infected with disease.

Ted Honderich --: One thinks of French philosophy that it aspires to the condition of literature or the condition of art, and that English and American philosophy aspires to the condition of science. French philosophy, one thinks of as picking up an idea and running with it, posibility into a nearby brick wall or over a local cliff, or something like that.

Karl Popper --: The theory of knowledge which I wish to propose is a largely Darwinian theory of the growth of knowledge. From the amoeba to Einstein, the growth of knowledge is always the same: we try to solve our problems, and to obtain, by a process of elimination, something approaching adequacy in our tentative solutions.

John McCrone --: There is... evidence that the cytoskeleton could serve as a primitive brain. Biologists have long been puzzled how a simple single-celled animal, like the slipper-shaped paramecium, could behave so intelligently when it has no nervous system. A paramecium is surprisingly nimble as it swims about in pond-bottom detritus, twisting in and out of tight spaces in search of its dinner. Somehow the protozoan manages to respond swiftly to information coming in from a light-sensitive eyespot and its touch-sensitive cilia to co-ordinate its swimming action. Several biologists have speculated that the cytoskeleton could serve as the communication and information processing link needed to organise such relatively complex behaviour.

Max Tegmark --: A mathematical structure is an abstract, immutable entity... If history were a movie, the structure would correspond not to a single frame of it but to the entire videotape. Consider, for example, a world made up of pointlike particles moving around in three-dimensional space. In four-dimensional spacetime --the bird perspective-- these particle trajectories resemble a tangle of spaghetti. If the frog [perspective] sees a particle moving with constant velocity, the bird sees a straight strand of uncooked spaghetti. If the frog sees a pair of orbiting particles, the bird sees two spaghetti strands intertwined like a double helix. To the frog, the world is described by Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, it is described by the geometry of the pasta --a mathematical structure. The frog itself is merely a thick bundle of pasta, whose highly complex intertwining corresponds [in is view] to a cluster of particles that store and process information. Our universe is far more complicated than this example, and scientists do not yet know to what, if any, mathematical structure it corresponds. [Parallel Universes]

Stephen J. Gould --: In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was." Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered. Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution. ["Evolution as Fact and Theory"; Discover, May 1981]

Max Tegmark --: In the early 20th century the theory of quantum mechanics revolutionized physics by explaining the atomic realm, which does not abide by the classical rules of Newtonian mechanics. Despite the obvious successes of the theory, a heated debate rages about what it really means. The theory specifies the state of the universe not in classical terms, such as the positions and velocities of all particles, but in terms of a mathematical object called a wave function. According to the Schrödinger equation, this state evolves over time in a fashion that mathematicians term "unitary," meaning that the wave function rotates in an abstract infinite-dimensional space called Hilbert space. Although quantum mechanics is often described as inherently random and uncertain, the wave function evolves in a deterministic way. There is nothing random or uncertain about it. The sticky part is how to connect this wave function with what we observe. Many legitimate wave functions correspond to counterintuitive situations, such as a cat being dead and alive at the same time in a so-called superposition. In the 1920s physicists explained away this weirdness by postulating that the wave function "collapsed" into some definite classical outcome whenever someone made an observation. This add-on had the virtue of explaining observations, but it turned an elegant, unitary theory into a kludgy, nonunitary one. The intrinsic randomness commonly ascribed to quantum mechanics is the result of this postulate. Over the years many physicists have abandoned this view in favor of one developed in 1957 by Princeton graduate student Hugh Everett III. He showed that the collapse postulate is unnecessary. Unadulterated quantum theory does not, in fact, pose any contradictions. Although it predicts that one classical reality gradually splits into superpositions of many such realities, observers subjectively experience this splitting merely as a slight randomness, with probabilities in exact agreement with those from the old collapse postulate. [Parallel Universes]

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