Illiuly > Illiuly's Quotes

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I find that most people serve practical needs. They have an understanding of the difference between meaning and relevance. And at some level my mind is more interested in meaning than in relevance. That is similar to the mind of an artist. The arts are not life. They are not serving life. The arts are the cuckoo child of life. Because the meaning of life is to eat. You know, life is evolution and evolution is about eating. It's pretty gross if you think about it. Evolution is about getting eaten by monsters. Don't go into the desert and perish there, because it's going to be a waste. If you're lucky the monsters that eat you are your own children. And eventually the search for evolution will, if evolution reaches its global optimum, it will be the perfect devourer. The thing that is able to digest anything and turn it into structure to sustain and perpetuate itself, for long as the local puddle of negentropy is available.
And in a way we are yeast. Everything we do, all the complexity that we create, all the structures we build, is to erect some surfaces on which to out compete other kinds of yeast. And if you realize this you can try to get behind this and I think the solution to this is fascism. Fascism is a mode of organization of society in which the individual is a cell in the superorganism and the value of the individual is exactly the contribution to the superorganism. And when the contribution is negative then the superorganism kills it in order to be fitter in the competition against other superorganisms. And it's totally brutal. I don't like fascism because it's going to kill a lot of minds I like.
And the arts is slightly different. It's a mutation that is arguably not completely adaptive. It's one where people fall in love with the loss function. Where you think that your mental representation is the intrinsically important thing. That you try to capture a conscious state for its own sake, because you think that matters. The true artist in my view is somebody who captures conscious states and that's the only reason why they eat. So you eat to make art. And another person makes art to eat. And these are of course the ends of a spectrum and the truth is often somewhere in the middle, but in a way there is this fundamental distinction.
And there are in some sense the true scientists which are trying to figure out something about the universe. They are trying to reflect it. And it's an artistic process in a way. It's an attempt to be a reflection to this universe. You see there is this amazing vast darkness which is the universe. There's all these iterations of patterns, but mostly there is nothing interesting happening in these patterns. It's a giant fractal and most of it is just boring. And at a brief moment in the evolution of the universe there are planetary surfaces and negentropy gradients that allow for the creation of structure and then there are some brief flashes of consciousness in all this vast darkness. And these brief flashes of consciousness can reflect the universe and maybe even figure out what it is. It's the only chance that we have. Right? This is amazing. Why not do this? Life is short. This is the thing we can do.”
― Joscha Bach

“We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“When we can't think for ourselves, we can always quote”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me
whether what I have thought has already been
thought before me by another.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“There are no subjects in the world. A subject is a limitation of the world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I needn’t live much longer.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
― Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers

“Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.”
― Werner Heisenberg

“In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.”
― Werner Heisenberg

“We can never know anything.”
― Werner Heisenberg

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“What can be shown, cannot be said.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“That it doesn’t strike us at all when we look around us, move about in space, feel our own bodies, etc. etc., shows how natural these things are to us. We do not notice that we see space perspectivally or that our visual field is in some sense blurred towards the edges. It doesn’t strike us and never can strike us because it is the way we perceive. We never give it a thought and it’s impossible we should, since there is nothing that contrasts with the form of our world.What I wanted to say is it’s strange that those who ascribe reality only to things and not to our ideas move about so unquestioningly in the world as idea and never long to escape from it.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks

“Maybe I am not very human - all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”
― Edward Hopper

“Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated "building blocks," but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitute the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object's interaction with the observer.”
― Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism

“Albert Einstein, for one, repeatedly expressed these feelings, as in the following celebrated passage (Einstein, 1949, p. 5): The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science…the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.”
― Fritjof Capra, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

“I always assumed everybody shared my love for overcast skies. It came as a shock to find out that some people prefer sunshine.”
― Glenn Gould, Glenn Gould Variations - By Himself and His Friends

“An agent does not have a model of its world - it is a model. In other words, the form, structure, and states of our embodied brains do not contain a model of the sensorium - they are that model. Every aspect of our brain and body can be predicted from our environment.”
― Karl J. Friston

“The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.”
― Simone Weil

“Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.”
― Susan Sontag

“Where are we really going? Always home.”
― Novalis