Quotes#
“I do not understand what I cannot create”
—Richard Feynman
“We are a bunch of brains trying to figure out how brains work”
—Unknown
“Mathematical objects are determined by–and understood by–the network of relationships they enjoy with all the other objects of their species.”
—Barry Mazur
“Time, space and causation are the three prime conditionings or filters that affect the mind. But you can lead your mind beyond these conditions. Time is the most powerful of all the filters that condition the mind.”
—Swami Rama
“Define consciousness.” —Person1 “Define definition.” —Person2
—Tim Bayne
“A lot of science and a lot of philosophy is about being in a community of nurturing scholars and being willing to learn from them and feeling supported – feeling that what you’re doing matters. I mean, I’ve always been interested in consciousness, but it took a community to give me the confidence that I might have something worth saying or there were people to collaborate with. I think that’s an important part of my story is feeling part of a community.”
-—Tim Bayne
“Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain” – Arthur Weasley (J.K. Rowling)
No one will ever miss the contributions you don’t make
-— Katalin K
“[A Computer Scientist] Restricting attention to conventional computation would be akin to biologists restricting their study to bacteria (because they are so numerous) while ignoring all other living things”
—B.J. MacLennan
“night science”: a stumbling, wandering exploration of the natural world that relies on intuition as much as it does on the cold, orderly logic of “day science.” In today’s vastly expanded scientific enterprise, obsessed with impact factors and competition, we will need much more night science to unveil the many mysteries that remain about the workings of organisms.
—Francois Jacob, Science 332: 767
“On an ordinary day, on the streets of Szeged, as I walked home from a clinic feeling horribly ill I had a flash of insight. No one would ever miss the contribution I didn’t make. No one would knock on my door and beg me to continue working. If I stopped or if I pulled back my efforts one bit at a time until I was giving less than my full potentional the loss would go entirely unnoticed. A world that is missing an important contribution looks ordinary. It is the definition of the status quo.”
—Katalin Karikó
“Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.”
—Hugo de Vries
“The mind is the idea of the body”
—Spinoza
“The thoughts themselves are the thinkers”
—William James
“The heart and soul of much mathematics consists of the fact that the “same” object can be presented to us in different ways”
—Barry Mazur
“Nature needs to preserve what works while exploring the new”
—Andreas Wagner
One of the wierd things about being an academic is that you have to walk this tight rope of believing really strongly in what you do while questing it all the time…its a hard balance to have…to really believe that you have good ideas while at the same time knowing they could all be wrong …if you get too far buried its good to bring it back home and ask yourself can I have an idea thats good enough as the person next to me rather than comparing against the greatest physicist that ever lived
—Paraphrased from Lisa Randall
“It follows that the soul is analogous to the hand; for as the hand is a tool of tools, so the mind is the form of forms and sense the form of sensible things.”
—Aristotle
“Think left think right and think low and think high, Oh the thinks you can think up if only you try!”
—Dr. Seuss
“Just do more problems”
—Prof Patrick McDonald
“…for the knowledge of certain principles easily compensates the last of knowledge of certain facts”
—Claude Adrien Helvetius
“Information is physical”
—Rolf Landaur
“There were constructors before there were abstractors”
-—Lee Cronin