Raff Kestarren

“In its use of this method natural science has shown a curious mixture
of rationalism and irrationalism. Its prevalent tone of thought has been
ardently rationalistic within its own borders, and dogmatically irrational
beyond those borders. In practice such an attitude tends to become a dog-
matic denial that there are any factors in the world not fully expressible in terms of its own primary notions devoid of further generalization. Such
a denial is the self-denial of thought.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

“With an influx of sensory information comes a need for complex internal processing. When more is known, decisions become more complicated.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds

“You sense what's going on and do something in response. But doing something, if you are made of many cells, is not a trivial matter, not something that can simply be assumed. It takes a great deal of coordination between your parts. This is not a big deal if you are a bacterium, but if you're a larger organism, things are different. Then you face the task of generating a coherent whole-organism action from the many tiny outputs--the tiny contractions, contortions, and twitches--of your parts.

A multitude of micro-actions must be shaped into a macro-action.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds

“As soon as high consciousness is reached, the enjoyment of existence is entwined with pain, frustration, loss, tragedy. Amid the passing of so much beauty, so much heroism, so much daring, Peace is then the intuition of permanence. It keeps vivid the sensitiveness to the tragedy; and it sees the fineness beyond the faded level of surrounding fact. Each tragedy is the disclosure of an ideal: What might have been, and was not; What can be. The tragedy was not in vain.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas