Relationship quotes

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Paul_Davies

Hidden Links

"Finding hidden links between seemingly disparate phenomena is what makes the scientific method so powerful and compelling. The distinctive feature of science is that it is both broad and deep: broad in the way it tackles all physical phenomena and deep in the way it weaves them, economically, into a common explanatory scheme requiring fewer and fewer assumptions. No other system of thought can match its breadth and depth."
  • Source: Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life (2007)

Ralph_Waldo_Emerson

Science Unpoetical

“Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it — which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.”
  • Source: Ralph Waldo Emerson, In 'Letters and Social Aims: Poetry and Imagination', Prose works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1880), Vol. 3, 199.

Hermann_von_Helmholtz

Movement and Perception

“Each movement we make by which we alter the appearance of objects should be thought of as an experiment designed to test whether we have understood correctly the invariant relations of the phenomena before us.”
  • Source: Helmholtz (1878) The Facts of Perception

Donald_Hoffman

AI Computation

“If we look at an LLM [Large Language Model] or a future AI [Artificial Intelligence], it's going to be some kind of computational system. And computational systems have their limits. We have Gödel who said that at a minimum. I'm betting that you and I are avatars of an infinite intelligence that's the true source of all creativity and that Einstein or any scientist taps into when they come up with their truly original ideas. The first step would be to say, if it's just a computational bias, then it doesn't transcend. It doesn't get to this true originality. But then there's a deeper level... These are just avatars in a particular headset. So why can't we create a new avatar in our headset that looks like a computer that is actually an avatar of the deep intelligence? If we are only going to stick with the computational thing... But somehow the [human] avatar is a portal into the infinite consciousness... And we know one way of creating new portals into this infinite consciousness, and that is having kids. So that is one technology that allows us to do that. Once we understand spacetime as a headset, and we understand the headset and at least some layers of its relationship to the infinite reality, that's the source of true insight and true originality and creativity, could we figure out new ways to open up genuine new portals, and might that look like AI… The jury is out.”
  • Source: Donald Hoffman, in the YouTube video entitled “Donald Hoffman's New Approach To Consciousness” channel “Dr Brian Keating”. Online at <https://youtu.be/mU_WBela71Y?si=fNfLLsOsUDRDC1XD> posted 2024-08, retrieved 2024-08. In video at 1:14:40.

William_James

Simple Sensation

“No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree.”
  • Source: William James (1890). From the book "The Principles of Psychology". Volume I. Chapter 9. Published in 1980 by Henry Holy, New York, NY.

Keywords: One_quotes Simple_quotes Sensation_quotes Itself_quotes Consciousness_quotes Natal_quotes Day_quotes Teeming_quotes Multiplicity_quotes Object_quotes Relationship_quotes Call_quotes Result_quotes Discriminative_quotes Attention_quotes Push_quotes Often_quotes High_quotes Degree_quotes

Bernardo_Kastrup

Irreducible Patterns

“If there are such irreducible macroscopic patterns, they — unlike cause and effect — may not entail relationships of strict necessity, but tendencies, affinities or dispositions instead... We cannot expect to pin down the corresponding events on the basis of empirical regularities and counterfactual dependences. Not only may these events not be consistently repeatable, the global patterns they reflect may be excluded from experiments by our very efforts to isolate the experimental setup and control its conditions. We cannot induce these acausal events at will. The best we can do is to pay attention to the world around us, in the hope of noticing one of them as it spontaneously unfolds... Next to causality, the physical world organizes itself along archetypal correspondences of meaning, which break down the barrier between world and psyche.”
  • Source: From “Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe”. Written by Bernardo Kastrup. Published by IFF Books, Washington DC. Kindle Edition. Page 53. Chapter 4.

Pierre-Simon_Laplace

System of Nature

“The present state of the system of nature is evidently a consequence of what it was in the preceding moment, and if we conceive of an intelligence that at a given instant comprehends all the relations of the entities of this universe, it could state the respective position, motions, and general affects of all these entities at any time in the past or future. Physical astronomy, the branch of knowledge that does the greatest honor to the human mind, gives us an idea, albeit imperfect, of what such an intelligence would be. The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time. Man owes that advantage to the power of the instrument he employs, and to the small number of relations that it embraces in its calculations. But ignorance of the different causes involved in the production of events, as well as their complexity, taken together with the imperfection of analysis, prevents our reaching the same certainty about the vast majority of phenomena. Thus there are things that are uncertain for us, things more or less probable, and we seek to compensate for the impossibility of knowing them by determining their different degrees of likelihood. So it was that we owe to the weakness of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories, the science of chance or probability.”
  • Source: Pierre-Simon Laplace, 'Recherches, 1º, sur l'Intégration des Équations Différentielles aux Différences Finies, et sur leur Usage dans la Théorie des Hasards' (1773, published 1776). In Oeuvres complètes de Laplace, 14 Vols. (1843-1912), Vol. 8, 144-5, trans. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749-1827: A Life in Exact Science (1997), 26.

Steven_Pinker

Information and Computation Medium

“Information and computation reside in patterns of data and in relations of logic that are independent of the physical medium that carries them.”
  • Source: Steven Pinker (1997). How the Mind Works. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-06973-0; eISBN 978-0-393-06973-0. Chapter 1 Section Reverse-Engineering the Psyche.

Michael_Polanyi

Vast Knowledge First and Second Hand

“Nobody knows more than a tiny fragment of science well enough to judge its validity and value at first hand. For the rest he has to rely on views accepted at second hand on the authority of a community of people accredited as scientists. But this accrediting depends in its turn on a complex organization. For each member of the community can judge at first hand only a small number of his fellow members, and yet eventually each is accredited by all. What happens is that each recognizes as scientists a number of others by whom he is recognized as such in return, and these relations form chains which transmit these mutual recognitions at second hand through the whole community. This is how each member becomes directly or indirectly accredited by all. The system extends into the past. Its members recognize the same set of persons as their masters and derive from this allegiance a common tradition, of which each carries on a particular strand.”
  • Source: Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), 163.

Karl_Popper

Epistemology

“In accordance with my proposal made above, epistemology, or the logic of scientific discovery, should be identified with the theory of scientific method. The theory of method, in so far as it goes beyond the purely logical analysis of the relations between scientific statements, is concerned with the choice of methods — with decisions about the way in which scientific statements are to be dealt with. These decisions will of course depend in their turn upon the aim which we choose from among a number of possible aims. The decision here proposed for laying down suitable rules for what I call the ‘empirical method’ is closely connected with my criterion of demarcation: I propose to adopt such rules as will ensure the testability of scientific statements; which is to say, their falsifiability.”
  • Source: Chapter 2. Popper, K. R. (2005). The Logic of Scientific Discovery | 1935 (1935/Epub ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Albert_Speer

Departure from Reality

“The departure from reality, which was visibly spreading like a contagion, was no peculiarity... In normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them. which makes them aware they have lost credibility... There were no such corrections, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world.”
  • Source: From the book "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer, published 1970 by Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-0-684-82949-4. Chapter 20, page 291.

Shannon_Vallor

Fighting AI

“We can’t fight AI without fighting ourselves. The harms to people and to society that may follow from our relationship to ‘intelligent’ machines are not foreign assaults, but symptoms of an internal disorder: a fully human pathology that requires collective self-examination, critique, and most of all, healing.”
  • Source: From the book “The AI Mirror” by Shannon Vallor. Published 2024 by Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0197759066. Introduction, page 4.

Shoshana_Zuboff

Animality

“The close relationship between the rejection of animality and the progress of civilization is at the heart of our modern conception of work. Marx expressed this relationship when he argued that mastery of the material world was the basis upon which man humanized himself and developed culture. This in fact is the civilizing process; humanization means tempering animality with rationality, aesthetic grace, and moral choice.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 30. ISBN:0465032125.

Panopticon Coaching

“To be sure, some managers saw the enhanced certainty of their information about subordinates as an opportunity to accelerate learning and improve performance. They found that the data from the Overview System made it possible to survey a wide range of behavior for evidence of irregularities. To the extent that the sources of such irregularities could be discovered, the data could be used to 'coach' subordinates and to help them realign their behavior within acceptable standards... On the other hand, many of Cedar Bluff's managers were more interested in the possibility of obtaining foolproof data than in the opportunity of using such data for coaching. In the context of a conventional technology, managers had to rely on their subordinates for valid information. The quality of the data they received was likely to be a function of the quality of the reciprocal relationship they had established. In contrast, an informating technology could provide valid information under any conditions.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 324. ISBN:0465032125.

Technology Change

“To fully grasp the way in which a major new technology can change the world... it is necessary to consider both the manner in which it creates intrinsically new qualities of experience and the way in which new possibilities are engaged by the often-conflicting demands of social, political, and economic interests in order to produce a 'choice.' To concentrate only on intrinsic change and the texture of an emergent mentality is to ignore the real weight of history and the diversity of interests that pervade collective behavior. However, to narrow all discussion of technological change to the play of these interests overlooks the essential power of technology to reorder the rules of the game and thus our experience as players. Moreover, these two dimensions of technological change, the intrinsic and the contingent, need to be understood, not separately, but in relation to one another. The same innovation that abstracts work and increases its intellectual content, thus enhancing the learning of lower level employees... can also, within the context of the choices by which it is adapted, be experienced as a new source of divisiveness and control.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 389. ISBN:0465032125.

Panopticon Coaching

“To be sure, some managers saw the enhanced certainty of their information about subordinates as an opportunity to accelerate learning and improve performance. They found that the data from the Overview System made it possible to survey a wide range of behavior for evidence of irregularities. To the extent that the sources of such irregularities could be discovered, the data could be used to 'coach' subordinates and to help them realign their behavior within acceptable standards... On the other hand, many of Cedar Bluff's managers were more interested in the possibility of obtaining foolproof data than in the opportunity of using such data for coaching. In the context of a conventional technology, managers had to rely on their subordinates for valid information. The quality of the data they received was likely to be a function of the quality of the reciprocal relationship they had established. In contrast, an informating technology could provide valid information under any conditions.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 324. ISBN:0465032125.