The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulae exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
God is dead. Let us not understand by this that he does not exist or even that he no longer exists. He is dead. He spoke to us and is silent. We no longer have anything but his cadaver. Perhaps he slipped out of the world, somewhere else like the soul of a dead man. Perhaps he was only a dream...God is dead.
Earlier in this century, the Heisenberg Principle established that the very act of observing a natural phenomenon can change what is being observed. Although the initial theory was limited in practice to special cases in subatomic physics, the philosophical implications were and are staggering.
Thousands of years of ideological, philosophical and practical decisions were made. They altered the surface of the earth, the coordinates of our souls. For every one of those decisions, maybe there's another decision that could have been made, should have been made.
Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.
By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
I have written occasionally on links between my scientific work and political thinking, but not much, because the links seem to me abstract and speculative.
By far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so
If we carry this line of argument to its logical conclusion, the meaning of life consists of the flaws in one's conceptions and what one does about them. Life can be seen as a fertile fallacy.
In our time the search for extraterrestrial life will eventually change our laws, our religions, our philosophies, our arts, our recreations, as well as our sciences. Space, the mirror, waits for life to come look for itself there.
'Ape House' is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be.
The price of freedom—of individuality—is attention to politics, careful planning, careful organization; philosophy is no more a barrier against political disaster than it is against plague.
The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness... but we have no idea how or why this happens. I'm afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that.
Finding intelligent life would encourage people and also of course the opportunity of learning a tremendous amount, but this is a danger. We might be so overwhelmed with knowledge and information, that we might be depressed or even become suicidal - because what's the point if they're thousands of years ahead of us? Why should we bother? - or become the ultimate couch potatoes.
What is a human-like droid that operates from a place of free will and has been designed to have a soul? That's fascinating stuff that you just can't quite comprehend quickly. It's not like playing a fireman with a wife and kid. You can gauge where that's going to go and what's going to happen, and you can talk to other people who have done it.
Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?
To me, Turing is as much of a philosopher as he is a mathematician because his ideas deal with what it means to think.
The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.
If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant in this respect almost alone among the philosophers was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications.
Evolution is true, it happens, it is the way the world is, and we too are one of its products. This does not mean that evolution does not have metaphysical implications; I remain convinced that this is the case.
This is what I call the "cosmological problem" of science. Science has the instrumental function that has given us computers and so on, but its cosmological function is to give us a picture of the world we inhabit as human beings, and on that level it's failing a vast number of people.
Tragedy is formed 'round ideas it does not expound, and to understand its history is, in some part, to understand those ideas and their place in the society that produced it.
More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question.
