Saphsin

Ludwig Wittgenstein

David Hume

Bernard Williams

Bertrand Russell

W.V.O. Quine

Daniel Dennett

John Leslie Mackie

Patricia Churchland

Soren Kierkegaard

Friedrich Nietzsche

John Stuart Mill

Socrates

Leo Tolstoy

Albert Einstein
Richard Feynmen
Steven Pinker
Jesus

"Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here."

- Leo Tolstoy

“Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that has.”

- Matthew Taylor (21st Century Enlightenment)

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

"Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it."

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself. In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all. Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle.”

- Soren Kierkegaard

"None of the books in my father's dusty old bookcase were forbidden. Yet while I was growing up, I never saw anyone take on down. Most were massive tomes-a comprehensive history of civilization, matching volumes of the great works of western literature, numerous others I can no longer recall that seemed almost fused to shelves that bowed slightly from decades of steadfast support. But way up on the highest shelf was think little text that, every now and then, would catch my eye because it seemed so out of place, like Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians. In hindsight, I'm not quite sure why I waited so log before taking a look. Perhaps, as the ears went by, the books seemed less like the material you read and more like family heirlooms you admire from afar. Ultimately, such reverence gave way to teenage brashness. I reached up for the little text, dusted it off, and opened to page one. The first few lines were, to say the least, startling. "There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide" the text began. I winced. "Whether or not the world has three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories, comes afterwards." Such questions, the text explained, were part of the game humanity played, but the deserved attention only after the one true issue had been settled. The book was The Myth of Sisyphus and was written by the Algerian-born philosopher and Nobel laureate Albert Camus. After a moment, the iciness of his words melted under the light of comprehension. Yes, of course, I thought. You can ponder this or analyze that till the cows come home, but the real question is whether all your pondering and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That's what it all comes to down to. Everything else is detail.

     My chance encounter with Camus' nook must have occurred during an especially impressionable phase because, more than anything else I'd read, his words stayed with me. Time and again I'd imagine how various people I'd met or heard about, or had seen on television would answer this primary of all questions. In retrospect, though, it was his second assertion - regarding the role of scientific progress - that for me, proved particularly challenging. Camus acknowledged value in understanding the structure of the universe, but as far as I can tell, he rejected the possibility that such understanding could make any difference to our assessment of life's worth. Now certainly, my teenage reading of existential philosophy was about as sophisticated as Bart Simpson's reading of Romantic poetry, but even so, Camus' conclusion struck me as off the mark. To this aspiring physicist, it seemed that an informed appraisal of life absolutely required a full understanding of life's arena, the universe. I remember thinking that if our species dwelled in cavernous outcroppings buried deep underground and so had yet to discover the earth's surface, brilliant sunlight, an ocean breeze, and the stars that lie beyond, or if evolution had proceeded along a different pathway and we had yet to acquire any but the sense of touch, so everything we knew came only from our tactile impressions of our immediate environment, or if human mental faculties stopped developing during early childhood so our emotional and analytical skills never progressed beyond those of a five year old - in short, if our experiences painted but a paltry portrait of reality - our appraisal of life would be thoroughly compromised. When we finally found our way to earth's surface, or when we finally gained the ability to see, hear, smell, and taste, or when our minds were finally freed to develop as they ordinarily do, our collective view of life and the cosmos would, of necessity, change radically. Our previously compromised grasp of reality would have shed a very different light on that most fundamental of all philosophical questions.

     But you might ask, what of it? Surely, any sober assessment would conclude that although we might not understand everything about the universe, every aspect of how matter behaves or life functions, we are privy to the defining, broad brush strokes gracing nature's canvas. Surely, as Camus intimated, progress in physics, such as understanding the number of space dimensions; or progress in neuropsychology, such as understanding all the organizational structures of the brain; or, for that matter, progress in any number of other scientific undertakings may fill in important details, but their impact on our evaluation of life and reality would be minimal. Surely, reality is what we think it is; reality is revealed to us by our experiences.

     To one extent or another, this view of reality is one many of us hold, if only implicitly. I certainly find myself thinking this way in day-to-day life; it's easy to be seduced by the face nature reveals directly to our senses. Yet, in the decades since first encountering Camus' text, I've learned that modern science tells us a very different story. The overarching lesson that has emerged from scientific inquiry over the last century is that human experience is often a misleading guide to the true nature of reality. Lying just beneath the surface of the everyday is a world we'd hardly recognize. Followers of the occult, devotees of astrology, and those who hold to religious principles that speaks to a reality beyond experience have, from widely varying perspectives, long since arrived at a similar conclusion. But that's not what I have in mind. I'm referring to the work of ingenious innovators and tireless researchers, the men and women of science, who have peeled back layer after layer of the cosmic onion, enigma by enigma, and revealed a universe that is at once surprising, unfamiliar, exciting, elegant, and thoroughly unlike what anyone ever expected. These developments are anything but details. Breakthroughs in physics have forced, and continue to force, dramatic revisions to our conception of the cosmos. I remained as convinced now as I did decades ago that Camus rightly chose life's value as the ultimate question, but the insight of modern physics have persuaded me that assessing life through the lens of everyday experience is like gazing at a van Gogh through an empty Coke bottle. Modern science has spearheaded one assault after another on evidence gathered from our rudimentary perceptions, showing that they often yield a clouded conception of the world we inhabit. And so whereas Camus separated out physical questions and labeled them secondary, I've become convinced that they're primary. For me, physical reality both sets the arena and provides the illumination for grappling with Camus' question. Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent. By deepening our understanding of the true nature of physical reality, we profoundly reconfigure our sense of ourselves and our experience of the universe.

 

     When I turned the last page of The Myth of Sisyphus many years ago, I was surprised by the text's having achieved an overarching feeling of optimism. After all, a man condemned to pushing a rock up a hill will full knowledge that it will roll back down, requiring him to start pushing anew is not the sort of story that you'd expect to have a happy ending. Yet Camus found much hope in the ability of Sisyphus to exert free will, to press on against insurmountable obstacles, and to assert his choice to survive even when condemned to an absurd task within an indifferent universe. By relinquishing everything beyond immediate experience, and ceasing to search for any kind of deeper understanding or deeper meaning, Sisyphus, Camus argued, triumphs. I was struck by Camus' ability to discern hope where most others would only despair. But as a teenager, and only more so in the decades since, I found that I couldn't embrace Camus' assertion that a deeper understanding of the universe would fail to make life more rich or worthwhile. Whereas Sisyphus was Camus' hero, the greatest of scientists - Newton, Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman - became mine. And when I read Feynman's description of a rose - in which he explained how he could experience the fragrance and beauty of the flower as fully as anyone, but how his knowledge of physics enriched the experience enormously because he could also take in the wonder and magnificence of the underlying molecular, atomic, and subatomic processes - I was hooked for good. I wanted what Feynman described: to assess life and to experience the universe on all possible levels, not just those that happened to be accessible to our frail human senses. The search for the deepest understanding of the cosmos became my lifeblood.

     As a professional physicist, I have long since realized that there was much naivete in my high school infatuation with physics. Physicists generally do not spend their working days contemplating flowers in a state of cosmic awe. Instead, we devote much of our time to grappling with complex mathematical equations scrawled across well-scored chalkboards. Progress can be slow. Promising ideas, more often than note, lead nowhere. That's the nature of scientific research. Yet, even during periods of minimal progress, I've found that the effort spent puzzling and calculating has only made me feel a closer connection to the cosmos. I've found that you can come to know the universe not only by resolving its mysteries, but also by immersing yourself within them. Answers are great. Answers confirmed by experiment are greater still. But even answers that are ultimately proven wrong represent the result of a deep engagement with the cosmos, an engagement that sheds intense illumination on the questions, and hence on the universe itself. Even when the rock associated with a particular scientific exploration happens to roll back to square one, we nevertheless learn something and our experience of the cosmos is enriched. Of course, the history of science reveals that the rock our collective scientific inquiry, with contributions from innumerable scientists across the continents and through the centuries, does not roll down the mountain. Unlike Sisyphus, we don't begin from scratch. Each generation takes over the previous, pays homage to its predecessors' hard work, insight, and creativity, and pushes up a little further. New theories and more refined measurements are the mark of scientific progress, and such progress builds on what came before, almost never wiping the slate clean. Because this is the case, our task is far from absurd or pointless. In pushing the rock up the mountain, we undertake the most exquisite and noble of tasks: to unveil this place we call home, to revel in the wonders we discover, and to hand off our knowledge to those who follow. For a species that, by cosmic time scales, has only just learned to walk upright, the challenges are staggering. Yet over the last three hundred years, as we've progressed from classical to relativistic and then to quantum reality, and have now moved on to explorations of unified reality, our minds and instruments have swept across the grand expanse of space and time, bringing us closer than ever to a world that has proved a deft master of disguise. And as we've continued to slowly unmask the cosmos, we've gained the intimacy that comes only from closing in on the clarity of truth. The explorations have far to go, but to many it feels as though our species is finally reaching childhood's end." 

 

- Brian Greene

 

 

 

“Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers — because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said “I don’t think there are flying saucers’. So my antagonist said, “Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it’s impossible?” “No”, I said, “I can’t prove it’s impossible. It’s just very unlikely”. At that he said, “You are very unscientific. If you can’t prove it impossible then how can you say that it’s unlikely?” But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, “Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.”

"In the Graduate College dining room at Princeton everybody used to sit with his own group. I sat with the physicists, but after a bit I thought: It would be nice to see what the rest of the world is doing, so I'll sit for a week or two in each of the other groups. When I sat with the philosophers I listened to them discuss very seriously a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They were using words in a funny way, and I couldn't quite understand what they were saying. Now I didn't want to interrupt them in their own conversation and keep asking them to explain something, and on the few occasions that I did, they'd try to explain it to me, but I still didn't get it. Finally they invited me to come to their seminar. They had a seminar that was like, a class. It had been meeting once a week to discuss a new chapter out of Process and Reality - some guy would give a report on it and then there would be a discussion. I went to this seminar promising myself to keep my mouth shut, reminding myself that I didn't know anything about the subject, and I was going there just to watch. What happened there was typical - so typical that it was unbelievable, but true. First of all, I sat there without saying anything, which is almost unbelievable, but also true. A student gave a report on the chapter to be studied that week. In it Whitehead kept using the words "essential object" in a particular technical way that presumably he had defined, but that I didn't understand. After some discussion as to what "essential object" meant, the professor leading the seminar said something meant to clarify things and drew something that looked like lightning bolts on the blackboard. "Mr. Feynman," he said, "would you say an electron is an 'essential object'?" Well, now I was in trouble. I admitted that I hadn't read the book, so I had no idea of what Whitehead meant by the phrase; I had only come to watch. "But," I said, "I'll try to answer the professor's question if you will first answer a question from me, so I can have a better idea of what 'essential object' means. What I had intended to do was to find out whether they thought theoretical constructs were essential objects. The electron is a theory that we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real. I wanted to make the idea of a theory clear by analogy. In the case of the brick, my next question was going to be, "What about the inside of the brick?" - and I would then point out that no one has ever seen the inside of a brick. Every time you break the brick, you only see the surface. That the brick has an inside is a simple theory which helps us understand things better. The theory of electrons is analogous."

Question: "Was it worth the Nobel Prize?"

"I don't know anything about the Nobel Prize. I don't understand what it's all about or what's worth what and if the people at the Swedish Academy decide that X, Y, or Z win the Nobel Prize then so be it. I won't have anything to do with the Nobel Prize, it's a pain in the neck. I don't like honors. I'm appreciated for the work that I did, and for people who appreciate it, and I notice that other physicists use my work. I don't need anything else. I don't think there's any sense to anything else. I don't see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize. I've already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don't believe in honors. It bothers me, honors bothers me. Honors is epilets, honors is uniforms. My pappa brought me up this way. I can't stand it, it hurts me. When I was in High School, one of the first honors I got was to be a member of the Arista, which is a group of kids who got good grades. Everybody wanted to be a member of the Arista. And when I got into the Arista, I discovered that what they did in their meetings was to sit around to discuss who else was worthy to join this wonderful group that we are. OK So we sat around trying to decide who would get to be allowed into this Arista. This kind of thing bothers me psychologically for one or another reason I don't understand myself. Honors, and from that day to this, always bothered me. I had trouble when I became a member of the National Academy of Science, and I had ultimately to resign, because there was another organization, most of whose time was spent in choosing who was illustrious enough to be allowed to join us in our organization. Including such questions as: 'we physicists have to stick together, because there's a very good chemist that they're trying to get in and we haven't got enough room...'. What's the matter with chemists? The whole thing was rotten. Because the purpose was mostly to decide who could have this honor. OK? I don't like honors."

"It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing—atoms with curiosity—that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate."

- Richard Feynmen

"I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research."

"We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."

"I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today and even professional scientists seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is in my opinion the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth."

- Albert Einstein

 

I am often ashamed of myself. I can remember having been so when quite young. There are different types of shame. The most common form is also the weakest, and primarily haunts us in youth: the shame of not being what we wish we were. This aspirational embarrassment is silly: where is the shame in not being as good-looking, intelligent, or well-liked as we might wish? Such shame is merely imaginative, and has nothing to do with the deeds that define us.

Real shame arises from our awareness that we are not who we say we are, even who we think we are; that we profit from and exploit others in subtle ways we ourselves don’t always recognize; that we seek adoration and coax its development by representing ourselves in calculated ways (even when ‘spontaneous’); and so on. Above all, it comes from the fact that there are many versions of our selves: the public, the private, the intimate, and the inside, the last of which none see. That there is dissonance between them, between their moralities and proclamations and behaviors, is the source of shame (and of our desire for privacy). That we should feel this shame is natural and even good: not only does it check our ordinary tendency towards self-aggrandizing, self-pity, and empathy for ourselves above others, but it provides us something to share with those we love. If you had no inner life, if your outer and inner worlds were utterly the same, to what inner space would you admit those you love?

Shame exists at the thresholds between our selves, thresholds already present in youth, when you are just becoming a person. My public self is ashamed that my private self is hurt when people don’t pay attention to him; my private self is ashamed that my intimate self wants love, needs love, like a pitiful child; my intimate self, however, is most ashamed, ashamed that my inside self is a moral void, an empty dark space where there is nothing but self-regard and a flickering awareness of how I shift who I am to be what others want. In friendship and love, you allow others to pass over these thresholds; that is what constitutes the bond, and that is what entails the risk. And the closer they get to the core, the more the qualities that define your outer selves (and attract others to you!) fade: the inner you is less funny, less intelligent, less engaging, because those are partly affectations. It is frightening when others come closer to your essence for this reason: What is it? A void? A desire to be loved? Is that all you are?