Gustav > Gustav's Quotes

“Will machines destroy emotions or will emotions destroy machines?”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

“Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light. That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.”
― John Desmond Bernal

“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”
― David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

“But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“If you could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

“Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life? ”
― Havelock Ellis

“Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn’t really philosophical to begin with.”
― Jerry A. Fodor, RePresentations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science

“Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound. For a child with an undetonated bomb in its hands, a sensible thing to do would be to put it down gently, quickly back out of the room, and contact the nearest adult. Yet what we have here is not one child but many, each with access to an independent trigger mechanism. The chances that we will all find the sense to put down the dangerous stuff seem almost negligible. Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“The fact that religious faith has left its mark on every aspect of our civilization is not an argument in its favor, nor can any particular faith be exonerated simply because certain of its adherents made foundational contributions to human culture.”
― Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Trust to yourself; let our own eyes determine;
Be they our tripods, oracles, and gods.”
― Voltaire, Oedipe de Corneille et Oedipe de Voltaire

“If we go back to the beginning we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them, and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of man serve its own interests.”
― Baron D. Holbach

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
― Denis Diderot

“Is knowledge the same thing as intelligence? No, but knowledge is an intelligence amplifier, if intelligence is, among other things, the ability to act nimbly and powerfully in your environment.”
― James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

“You know, the aspirants believe this is the only true existence. That everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it. That’s comforting, isn’t it.”
― Richard K. Morgan, Woken Furies

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV”
― Morty

“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.”
― Voltaire

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
― Elie Wiesel

“(...) we should strive to grow consciousness
itself — to generate bigger, brighter lights in an otherwise dark universe.”
― Giulio Tononi, Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
― John Muir