William > William's Quotes

“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“How do fields express their principles? Physicists use terms like photons, electrons, quarks, quantum wave functions, relativity, and energy conservation. Astronomers use terms like planets, stars, galaxies, Hubble shift, and black holes. Thermodynamicists use terms like entropy, first law, second law, and Carnot cycle. Biologists use terms like phylogeny, ontology, DNA, and enzymes. Each of these terms can be considered to be the thread of a story. The principles of a field are actually a set of interwoven stories about the structure and behavior of field elements, the fabric of the multiverse.”
― Peter J. Denning