Max More > Quotes

“The “I” is a grammatical fiction (Nietzsche). There are bundles of impressions but no underlying self (Hume). There is no survival because there is no person (Buddha, Parfit).”
― Max More, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future

“Mother Nature, truly we are grateful for what you have made us. No doubt you did the best you could. However, with all due respect, we must say that you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution. You have made us vulnerable to disease and damage. You compel us to age and die – just as we’re beginning to attain wisdom. And, you forgot to give us the operating manual for ourselves! … What you have made is glorious, yet deeply flawed … We have decided that it is time to amend the human constitution … We do not do this lightly, carelessly, or disrespectfully, but cautiously, intelligently, and in pursuit of excellence … Over the coming decades we will pursue a series of changes to our own constitution … We will no longer tolerate the tyranny of aging and death … We will expand our perceptual range … improve on our neural organization and capacity … reshape our motivational patterns and emotional responses … take charge over our genetic programming and achieve mastery over our biological and neurological processes.”
― Max More, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future

“We have achieved two of the three alchemists' dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly. Immortality is next.”
― Max More

“Progress should not bow to fear, but should proceed with eyes wide open.”
― Max More, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future

“And so Pascal’s wager: either you believe in God or you don’t; if there is no God it can’t do any harm to believe in him because he’s not going to punish you because he doesn’t exist; on the other hand if you don’t believe in him and there is one then he’ll be mad at you and you won’t get eternal life. That argument convinced a lot of people that it didn’t do any harm to believe in religion. But in fact it did them harm and it’s what killed them all because if they had believed in science instead of religion 2,000 years ago we would all be immortal now.”
― Max More, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future

“For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant … Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely.”
― Max More, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future

“If it be admitted that a man possessing absolute power may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should not a majority be liable to the same reproach?”
― Max More, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future

“The human brain has up to one hundred billion (1011) neurons and between one hundred trillion (1014) and one quadrillion (1015) synapses.”
― Max More, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future

“Plato says: [The young democratic man] spends as much money, effort, and time on unnecessary pleasures as on necessary ones … And he doesn’t admit any word of truth into the guardhouse, for if someone tells him that some pleasures belong to fine and good desires and others to evil ones … he denies all this and declares that all pleasures are equal and must be valued equally … And so he lives on, yielding day by day to the desire at hand … And isn’t it inevitable that freedom should go to all lengths in such a city? … a father accustoms himself to behave like a child and fear his sons, while the son behaves like a father, feeling neither shame nor fear in front of his parents …”
― Max More, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future

“If life is the universe, and if the whole of nature is alive, is death not just a transmutation of matter, thereby affirming that nothing is dead or inanimate?”
― Max More, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future

“Art in the twenty-first century may come to constitute a form of mediation between human and post-human consciousness, just as in past cultures it has been used to mediate between mankind and the gods.”
― Max More, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future

“According to the dictionary entry on extracellular matrix in the Biology Online resource, biologists have recently become aware of the fact that an organism’s environment or substrate (e.g. extracellular matrix) can influence the behavior of cells quite markedly, possibly even more significantly than DNA in the development of complex organisms. The removal of cells from their usual environment to another environment can have far-reaching effects.”
― Max More, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future