Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

A thing is never seen as it really is.

The possibilities that are suggested in quantum physics tell us that everything that we're looking at may not be in fact there, so the underlying nature of being is weird.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

I'm less interested in reality. I'm more interested in perception, the truth of the universe that we see.

Reality is often measurably different from the perception projected through the media. But the speed of that projection, and thus of that perception and of the public’s response thereto, is such that policy must now be made in response not to the reality but to the perception. Thus the media have the power (consciously or not) to create a perception that can force a response which objectively becomes "reality" but which may have nothing to do with the original "real" reality. This contributes not only to the appearance of chaos but also to the making of crises.

When real is gone, then there is no longer a litmus test for that which deviates from it. It's all real because it's all 'real.'

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

Rocks are space, and space is illusion.

What is this universe but name and form?

The Universe does not know if the vibration you are offering is because of what you are imagining, or because of what you are observing.

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.

Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

A thing is a thing, not what is said of a thing

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.

Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

I noticed a long time ago that the Universe rewards belief systems. It doesn't really matter what you believe - it'll be there and waiting for you if you go and look for it. Decide the universe is, say, run by secret enormous teddy bears, and I can guarantee you'll immediately start running across evidence that this is true.

No, My son, the evolutionists are not right. I created all of this-all of this-in the blink of an eye; in one holy instant-just as the creationists have said. And...it came about through a process of evolution taking billions and billions of what you call years, just as the evolutionists claim. They are both "right." As the cosmonauts discovered, it all depends on how you look at it.

I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. (Dreams In The Witch-House)

The dream of life is really an illusion, and everybody lives in the reality he or she creates - a virtual reality that is only true for the one who creates it.

Your life is a gift. Before anything else can be said about you, for some reason the universe (or God, or being, or force, or reality, or whatever you name it) chose to give you life.

Once you gave a thing a name, you gave it life.