Quotes for a July 2009

As usual, I have sourced the following quotes from LessWrong's monthly quote bash.

"Do stuff, read stuff, think and make up your mind. Have you actually selected an entity which you think of as "objective"? This is like having a slave port in your brain."
-- yosefk


"There is no real me! Don't try to find the real me! Don't try to find someone inside of me who isn't me!"
-- Princess Waltz


"When I was young, I thought the act of getting older meant, year by year, getting more sophisticated, more hard, cool, and unpitying. Less innocent.


"Maybe that was a childish idea of what getting older was about. Maybe adults, mature adults, get more innocent with time, not less. Because the word "innocent" does not mean "naive," it means "not guilty."


"Children do small evils to each other, schoolyard fights and insults, not because their hearts are pure, but because their powers are small. Grown-ups have more power. Some of them do great evils with that power. But what about the ones who don't? Aren't they more innocent than children, not less?"
-- John C. Wright, Fugitives of Chaos




"Philosophers who reject God, Cartesian dualism, souls, noumenal selves, and even objective morality cannot bring themselves to do the same for the concepts of free will and moral responsibility. The question is: Why?"
-- Tamnor Sommers — Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context, “The Illusion of Freedom Evolves”



"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
-- Voltaire




"The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head."
-- Terry Pratchett, 'Hogfather'




"Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time."
-- Terry Pratchett, 'Hogfather'




"Experiment and theory often show remarkable agreement when performed in the same laboratory."
-- Daniel Bershader



"Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions."
-- William James



"I don't know how many people I've met who hold beliefs like "in three card stud a four is more likely to come up after an eight than a six." What the fuck? Is the concept of random that hard to grasp?"
-- Alphadominance



"The Mathemagician nodded knowingly and stroked his chin several times. "You'll find," he remarked gently, "that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort.""
-- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth



"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice that failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."
-- R.D. Laing, Knots



"Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do: such things as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe."
-- David Stove, What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts



"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."
-- Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, 'Good Omens'


"Go is a game of big moves and little moves. One problem we will examine here is what may look big now can, in the final analysis, be small, and vice versa. The ability to see what is and what is not territory and potential territory is to see the truth on the board."
– Peter Shotwell, Go: More than a game



"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house."
-- Robert Heinlein (as Lazarus Long)


"You say that your opponent lacks humanity. It's the oldest semantic weapon there is. Think of all the categories of people who've been classified as non-human, in various cultures, at various times. People from other tribes. People with other skin colors. Slaves. Women. The mentally ill. The deaf. Homosexuals. Jews. Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Armenians, Kurds [...]


"But suppose you accuse me of 'lacking humanity.' What does that actually mean? What am I likely to have done? Murdered someone in cold blood? Drowned a puppy? Eaten meat? Failed to be moved by Beethoven's Fifth? Or just failed to have—or to seek—an emotional life identical to your own in every respect? Failed to share all your values and aspirations?


"The answers is: 'any one of the above.' Which is why it's so fucking lazy. Questioning someone's 'humanity' puts them in the company of serial killers—which saves you the trouble of having to claim anything intelligent about their views."
-- Greg Egan (as James Rourke), Distress



"The future already happened. We just haven't reached it yet." - Sarda the Sage
-- Brian Clevinger, 8-Bit Theater


"The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed."
-- William Gibson — National Public Radio: “Fresh Air”, Aug. 31, 1993



"That's not right. It's not even wrong."
-- Wolfgang Pauli



"Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled 'wrong'."
-- Raymond Smullyan



"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
-- Albert Einstein




"Don Quixote: Dost not see? A monstrous giant of infamous repute whom I intend to encounter.


Sancho Panza: It's a windmill.


Don Quixote: A giant. Canst thou not see the four great arms whirling at his back?


Sancho Panza: A giant?


Don Quixote: Exactly."
-- Cervantes