Think quotes

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Contents

Christopher_Wolfgang_Alexander

Negative Requirements

“If we think of the requirements from a negative point of view, as potential misfits, there is a simple way of picking a finite set. This is because it is through misfit that the problem originally brings itself to our attention.”

Isaac_Asimov

Science Uncertainty

“Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.”
  • Source: Isaac Asimov, The ‘Threat’ of Creationism. In Ashley Montagu (ed.), Science and Creationism, published 1984, page 192.

Marcus_Aurelius

Look Upon Reality

“If a man affronts you, do not accept his opinion or think just as he would have you do. No, look upon things as reality presents them.”

Robert_S_Barton

Software from the Middle

“I think at this point in the field we are almost forced to start in the middle, if we are concerned with the problem of general software construction and the organization of the machines to go with these programs.”

Arthur_Bloch

Murphy's Law Corollary 2

"Everything takes longer than you think."
  • Source: Attributed to Edward A Murphy, reported in the book “Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong” written by Arthur Bloch, first edition published in 1977 by Price/Stern/Sloan, Los Angeles, California. ISBN-10: 0843104287. ISBN-13: 978-0843104288. Chapter Murphology, page 11.

Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

Stupidity Liberation

“Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the  people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly.”
  • Source: From the paper “An Account at the Turn of the Year 1942-1943” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, contained within the book “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Volume 8: Letters and Papers from Prison” edited by John W. Gruchy, et al. Published in 2009 by Fortress Press.

Robert_N_Britcher

Important Development Things

“The single, most important thing is that the individual programmer needs to be given total responsibility and control of the programming, including its function... eliminate project design and review as an exhaustive and rigorous process. Most of the design and review should occur as the program is written. ... Monitor progress on the project by talking to the individual programmers as [code] is being written. ... You must trust developers on the project to create a good product. ... Sometimes there are failures. ... The important thing is to fail quickly so you have time to find another approach. ... Developers must also feel free to say what they think to their supervisor. ... Managers should be the best programmers; ...There should be no overtime pay. ... Use profit-sharing and bonuses to get awesome products. ... Developers should each get their own office. ... Eliminate the dress code. Avoid meetings at all costs. ... Writing software is a lot like writing a book. Almost anyone can write garbage; very few can write a best-seller.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 155-156.

Fred_Brooks

AI and Design

“The initial hope, long delayed in realization and I think impossible, was that AI techniques could not only take over much of the drudgery of routine design but even produce brilliant designs lying outside the domains usually explored by humans.”
  • Source: Brooks Jr., F. P. (2010). The Design of Design. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 978-0-201-36298-5. Preface.

Giordano_Bruno

Common Sense

"Common sense isn’t the truest sense."

Octavia_E_Butler

We Say

“Beware: All too often, we say what we hear others say. We think what we’re told that we think. We see what we’re permitted to see. Worse! We see what we’re told that we see. Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To hear and to see even an obvious lie again and again and again may be to say it, almost by reflex then to defend it because we’ve said it and at last to embrace it because we’ve defended it and because we cannot admit that we’ve embraced and defended an obvious lie. Thus, without thought, without intent, we make mere echoes of ourselves — and we say what we hear others say.”
  • Source: Written by Octavia E. Butler in her book entitled “Parable of the Talents”. Chapter 18. First published by Seven Stories Press, New York, NY, in 1998. ISBN-13: 978-1-888363-81-4.

Arthur_Eddington

Brain and Mind

“Take the living human brain endowed with mind and thought. Thought it is one of the indisputable facts of the world. I know that I think, with a certainty which I cannot attribute to any of my physical knowledge of the world. More hypothetically, but on fairly plausible evidence, I am convinced that you have minds which think. Here then is a world fact to be investigated. The physicist brings his tools and commences systematic exploration. All that he discovers is a collection of atoms and electrons and fields of force arranged in space and time, apparently similar to those found in inorganic objects. He may trace other physical characteristics, energy, temperature, entropy. None of these is identical with thought. He might set down thought as an illusion ⎯ some perverse interpretation of the interplay of the physical entities that he has found. Or if he sees the folly of calling the most undoubted element of our experience an illusion, he will have to face the tremendous question, How can this collection of ordinary atoms be a thinking machine?”

Albert_Einstein

Moon Reality

“I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of measurements. That is, an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it is not being measured. I like to think the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.”
  • Source: Earliest published version found in the 1999 book ‘Words Fail Me’ by Patricia O'Conner, page 41.
    • The part about the moon is probably based on Abraham Pais' recollection: "We often discussed his notions on objective reality. I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it". As recalled by his biographer Abraham Pais in Reviews of Modern Physics, 51, 863 (1979): 907.

Epictetus

Learn Already Knows

“It is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.”
  • Source: [Speaker] Epitetus; [Greek]; [Transcription/Transcriber] Arrian; [Transcription/Date] circa 108 CE; [Note] Arrian was the pupil of Epitetus.; [Translation/Title] “Discourses of Epictetus”; [Translator] {W. A. Oldfather}; [English]; [Book/Publisher] Harvard University Press; [Publisher/Location] Cambridge, MA; [Publication/Dates] 1925,1946,1956; [Placement] Book II, Chapter 17, Section 1; [Placement]; [Online] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Epictetus,_the_Discourses_as_reported_by_Arrian,_the_Manual,_and_Fragments; [Retrieved/Date] 2022.

David_Epstein

Scientific Method Constraints

“Well-conceived constraints, like those at the heart of the scientific method, compel us to stop, think, and test. In other words, they force us to learn.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 43. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

The Box

“Sometimes new ideas require entirely new forms. It’s not that we need to ‘think outside the box,’ so to speak, as much as we need to craft a new box, for new ideas. Constraints can help with that.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 70. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

Richard_Feynman

No One Understands Quantum

“I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it possibly be like that?' because you will go down the drain into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.”
  • Source: Richard Feynman, in The Character of Physical Law (1965).

Cargo Cult

“...there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on — with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train rats to go to the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before. The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe they were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell. He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go to the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using — not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running. I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or of being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.”
  • Source: "Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 345.
    • Feynman, R. P. (1974). In Feynman, R. P. (1974, June). Cargo Cult Science. Science and Engineering.

Galileo

Taste Color Consciousness

“I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated”
  • Source: Galileo Galilei, in The Assayer, published 1623, as reprinted in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, translated by Stillman Drake, published 1957, page 274.

Dedre_Gentner

Planet Running

“Our ability to think relationally is one of the reasons we're running the planet. Relations are really hard for other species.”
  • Source: Dedre Gentner in an interview with author David Epstein reported in his book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”. Published 2019 by Riverhead Books. Chapter 5, page 103. ISBN 978-0735214484.

Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe

Intelligent Thoughts

“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.”
  • Original German: ‘Alles Gescheite ist schon gedacht worden. Man muss nur versuchen, es noch einmal zu denken’.
  • Source: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the novel “Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre” published 1821.

Stuart_Hameroff

Brain Neurons

“Well I used to think as other people do that the brain is a computer and I think instead, as I have said before, it's more of a multi-scale hierarchical system. More like a musical system in some sense. I'd refer to it as a quantum orchestra. Because I think the computational metaphor doesn't work because, well it works to a point but it treats neurons  as simple on/off switches and that's an insult to neurons... If you go inside neurons there's all this interesting, I hate to use the word complex because I think complexity is often the last refuge of the bewildered. Just say it's complex and that explains everything which I think is wrong. But you have all this structure, these microtubules doing all this interesting quantum stuff and quantum computation reducing by OR [Orchestrated Objective Reduction/Orch OR] is not the kind of computation I was disillusioned with. So, I'd say that one thing is that the brain is a multi-scale hierarchal system more like music than a classical computer.”
  • Source: Stuart Hameroff speaking in the YouTube video entitled “Sir Roger Penrose & Stuart Hameroff: Collapsing a theory of quantum consciousness? Part 2 (248)” on the channel entitled “Dr Brian Keating” streamed live 2022-08-05, retrieved 2024-04-17 from <https://www.youtube.com/live/OoDi856wLPM?si=XJrLm0AVUIl_dECG>.

Douglas_Hofstadter

Thinking At A Different Level

“It is when something goes wrong that it is important to be able to think on different levels.”
  • Source: Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Written by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Basic Books, New York, NY. ISBN 13: 978-046502656-2. ISBN 10: 046502656-7. Chapter 10. Page 294.

Sabine_Hossenfelder

Quantum Opinion

“I think we need a political quantum orientation so that you can hold all political positions at the same time as long as no one asks.”

Steve_Jobs

Misfits

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
  • Source: Steve Jobs in “Motivating Thoughts of Steve Jobs”, published by Prabhat Prakashan in 2020. ISBN: 9789351869191.

Carl_Jung

Knowledge of the Heart

“How can I attain the knowledge of the heart? You can attain this knowledge only by living your life to the full. You live your life fully if you also live what you have never yet lived, but have left for others to live or to think. You will say: ‘But I cannot live or think everything that others live or think.’ But you should say: ‘The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.’”
  • Source: Written by Carl G. Jung in ‘The Red Book’, also known as ‘Liber Novus’, which was originally written from 1914 to 1930. It was first published in 2009 by W. W. Norton in a facsimile edition, complete with an English translation. The edition used here is the book ‘The Red Book: Liber Novus: A Reader's Edition’, written by C. G. Jung, edited with an introduction by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani; published by W. W. Norton in 2012; ISBN 978-0393089080; Page 133.

Bernardo_Kastrup

Psyche Spectrum

“Jung invites us to think of the psyche as something analogous to the spectrum of light, which runs from the infra-red to the ultra-violet. In the middle of the spectrum, corresponding to visible light, we have the psyche proper. On the higher, ultra-violet end we have the spiritual psychoid. On the lower, infrared end we have the instinctual psychoid.”
  • 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 82. Chapter 5.

John_Maynard_Keynes

Traditional Purpose

“Thus, we have been expressly evolved by nature — with all our impulses and deepest instincts — for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose. Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades.”
  • Source: From the Essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” written by John Maynard Keynes in 1930. Included in the book “Essays in Persuasion” edited by John Maynard Keynes and published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1963.

Pim_van_Lommel

Materialist Science

“In materialist science, only that is true that you can objectify, what you can measure, what you can duplicate, or what you can falsify. Then it is true. Now what you feel and what you think, your consciousness, you cannot objectify, you cannot duplicate, you cannot measure, and you cannot falsify. Consciousness, the essence of who you are, what you feel, what you think, is beyond our current materialist science. So, they call it an illusion. But it is the essence of who we are. We have to expand science into post-materialist science. We have to change the paradigm to include subjective experiences... Science should include subjective experiences into the scientific method... The materialist aspect of science is still important, but it's not enough... This is a totally different approach when you realize that everything has its subjective aspects.”
  • Source: Words from Pim van Lommel in a video interview. From the YouTube video “Consciousness beyond death, with Dr. Pim van Lommel” on the Essentia Foundation channel. Posted 2023-07-23. Online at https://youtu.be/NVsBFOB7H44. Offset 46:19.

Thomas_Robert_Malthus

Population and Subsistence

“I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state... Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio... This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere; and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind... The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years... Consequently, if the premises are just, the argument is conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind.”
  • Source: Thomas Robert Malthus. The essay: “An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Goodwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers”. Originally published: 1798. Edition: First. Publisher: J. Johnson. Location: London, England. Chapter: 1. Retrieved From: <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population>. Retrieval Date: 2024-04-03.
  • Notes: The dire predictions of Malthus have not yet been fulfilled. This is primarily due to errors in his initial assumptions (which are properly identified), not in errors in his logic. The first assumption (or postulatum) is that food production increases arithmetically (linearly). But historically, food production has increased geometrically (exponentially) due to advances in mechanical technologies and biotechnologies. The second assumption assumes passion and birth rates are directly correlated. However, technological advances in birth control, cultural advances in women's rights, and rising prosperity (which lowers birth rates) have falsified this assumption. Additional questionable assumptions are also made which are not initially specified.

Pearl_and_Mackenzie

Strong AI

“The successes of deep learning have been truly remarkable... Nevertheless, deep learning has succeeded primarily by showing that certain questions or tasks we thought were difficult are in fact not. It has not addressed the truly difficult questions that continue to prevent us from achieving humanlike AI. As a result the public believes that ‘strong AI,’ machines that think like humans, is just around the corner or maybe even here already. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth.”
  • Source: Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie in “The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect”. Published by Basic Books of New York, NY in 2018. Chapter 1, page 30. ISBN 978-0465097616 (ebook).

Alan_Perlis

Programming Language

“A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.”

Plato

Dreaming

“(Socrates) There's a question you must often have heard people ask - the question what evidence we could offer if we were asked whether in this present instant, at this moment, we are asleep and dreaming all our thoughts, or awake and talking to each other in real life.
(Theaetetus) Yes, Socrates, it certainly is difficult to find the proof we want here. The two states seem to correspond in all their characteristics. There is nothing to prevent us from thinking when we are asleep that we are having the very same discussion that we have just had. And when we dream that we are telling the story of a dream, there is an extraordinary likeness between the two experiences.”
  • Source: Plato, 'Theaetetus' 158bc

Ayn_Rand

Not There

“But we aren't, we aren't corpses in graves. We're not there, do you understand that when this life is finished, you're not there to say: ‘Oh, how terrible that I'm a corpse.’? No, it is finished. And what I always thought and what affected me all my life: ‘I'll not die, it is the world that will end.’ And that's absolutely true. I want to enjoy life to the fullest and when it ends I don't have to worry about that. I'm not there.”

Claude_Shannon

Turing Machine

“We may think of a Turing machine as composed of three parts — a control element, a reading and writing head and an infinite tape.”
  • Source: From a book section entitled “A Universal Turing Machine with Two Internal States” by Claude Shannon, within the book “Automata Studies”, edited by C. E. Shannon and J. McCarthy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956. Pages 157-166. DOI 10.1515/9781400882618-007.

Baruch_Spinoza

Free Will and Hidden Causes

“Herefrom it follows, first, that men think themselves free inasmuch as they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them so to wish and desire. Secondly, that men do all things for an end, namely, for that which is useful to them, and which they seek.”

Alan_Turing

Can Machines Think

“The question, ‘Can machines think?’ should be replaced by ‘Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?’... The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.”
  • Source: From the paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by Alan Turing. Published in 1950 in “Mind”, volume 49, number 236.

Consciousness

“I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localize it.”
  • Source: From the paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by Alan Turing. Published in 1950 in “Mind”, volume 49, number 236.

Gerald_Weinberg

Correct Models

“Such models need not be correct; in fact, one does not so much ask whether or not the model is correct as whether it adequately or inadequately fulfills its purpose. When we travel to work, we unconsciously use a flat-Earth model of the terrain, as we think most people do on their ordinary journeys.”
  • Source: Weinberg, Gerald (2011-06-03). Passive Regulation: General Systems Design Principles (General Systems Thinking) (Kindle Locations 2186-2188). Weinberg & Weinberg. Kindle Edition.

E_O_Wilson

Drowning in Information

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”
  • Source: p. 294 Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). Vintage Books. ISBN: 9780679450771. ISBN: 9780679768678.

Stephen_Wolfram

Time

“Time is the inexorable progress of computation. If we think about things in the world as being governed by rules, then what happens in the course of time is those rules get applied... The thing that changes through time is that we've applied these rules more and more and more times.”
  • Source: Spoken by Stephen Wolfram in a video interview with Brian Keating recorded in the YouTube video ‘Stephen Wolfram | My Discovery Changes Everything’ published on channel ‘Dr. Brian Keating’ on 2024-01-19. Video offset 15:16. Online at https://youtu.be/c-RO3vM10Ok?si=i-XspeEtzqA3jPl9 retrieved 2024.

Simple Purpose

“Whenever there’s computational irreducibility we can think of it as exerting a powerful force towards unpredictability and randomness... So for a system to achieve an overall “computationally simple purpose” this computational irreducibility must in some sense be tamed, or at least contained. And in fact it’s an inevitable feature of computational irreducibility that within it there must be “pockets of computational reducibility” where simpler behavior occurs. And at some level the way computationally simple purposes must be achieved is by tapping into those pockets of reducibility. When there’s computational irreducibility it means that there’s no simple narrative one can expect to give of how a system behaves, and no overall “mechanism” one can expect to identify for it. But one can think of pockets of computational reducibility as corresponding to at least small-scale “identifiable mechanisms”... When there’s a “simple overall purpose” being achieved these mechanisms tend to become more manifest.”

Shoshana_Zuboff

Work Life Balance

“A machinist gained prominence when he debated Taylor in 1914 and remarked, 'we don't want to work as fast as we are able to. We want to work as fast as we think it's comfortable for us to work. We haven't come into existence for the purpose of seeing how great a task we can perform through a lifetime. We are trying to regulate our work so as to make it auxiliary to our lives.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 46. ISBN:0465032125.