“The conscious self…that’s what we call consciousness today. I think it’s also something like a computational tool that helps us to navigate the world, like the mouse pointer that tells you ‘You are here and now and you can control this and that’. And so we actually have something like a simulation of the world, and I think the amazing thing is Mother Nature has done this much better than any computer today. Millions of years ago we have this feeling of being present in the world as selves, and that’s a great achievement of natural evolution and the evolution of nervous systems, but it’s virtual.”
“It’s just like your physics teacher perhaps told you in high school, in front of your eyes there is just a raging ocean of different wavelength mixtures, there are no coloured objects. Coloured objects are the models your brain creates of visual objects. The world model our brains create has many dimensions, it has the dimension of auditory perceptions, of sound and speech and music, of colours and smell. But it also has these gut feelings, all our body perceptions, moods, emotions, all these are parts of…it’s like a thin film which creates the boundary to the world. I’m not saying there is no outside world and I’m also not saying we’re not in contact with it and we don’t act in the world, but just for conscious experience, how it appears to you, that is actually an inner space, that is something that is very local in your own brain. In the real world there is no self as one substantial thing. That’s part of the simulation.”
“The global brain is the quasi-neural energy - and information - processing network created by six and a half billion humans on the planet, interacting in many ways, private as well as public, and on many levels, local as well as global. A quantum shift in the global brain is a sudden and fundamental transformation in the relations of a significant segment of the six and a half billion humans to each other and to nature - a macroshift in society - and a likewise sudden and fundamental transformation in cutting-edge perceptions regarding the nature of reality - a paradigm shift in science. The two shifts together make for a veritable “reality revolution” in society as well as in science.”
“New technologies beget new perceptions. Reality is a man-made process. Our images of our world and of ourselves are, in part, models resulting from our perceptions of the technologies we generate.”
“We replace the unknown with the known through the substitution of words and by the time a child is two or three they have completely created a cultural mosaic of words that is interposed between them and reality. Reality from that point on is only an unconfirmed rumor brought through the medium of language and every culture accentuates different parts of reality so that in a sense every culture is a different reality. Language is the stuff of the world, not quarks or wave-packets or neutrinos, but language. Everything is made of language. All the constructs of science are actually interlocking constructs of syntax. So that’s ordinary language which seems to define reality through a kind of process of lying about it. For instance by creating subject-object distinctions which are, in fact, not true to the matter, but somehow operationally necessary for us to navigate in the kind of lower dimensional space that we inhabit.”
“We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.”
“Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.”
“The universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass.”
“To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”
— William Blake
“The absurd is the essential concept of the first truth.”
— Albert Camus
“Progress is the realization of utopias.”
“If Western man now stops thinking and dreaming the materials of new images of the future and attempts to shut himself up in the present, out of longing for security and for fear of the future, his civilization will come to an end. He has no choice but to dream or to die, condemning the whole of Western society to die with him.”
“My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”
