"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand"
Albert Einstein (via sandygautam)
(via wildcat2030)
"The problem is not with us realizing that people can feel at one with the universe or, especially, at one with God; the problem comes with us taking this as evidence for some supernatural reality. What does it mean to say that an experience is legitimate? If someone thinks that he saw Jesus, I am prepared to believe that he thought that he saw Jesus, but I am not prepared to say that he really did see Jesus, nor that that constitutes any evidence for the existence of Jesus."
"One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question,—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map."
Drugs and the Meaning of Life : Sam Harris]
"Quantum computers, in short, may become extraordinarily powerful tools — but, even as an idea, they are already vessels we can use to continue our exploration of the world of logic, math, and reason. Computers, on our desks or in our pockets, have extended our practical reach in countless ways. But they’ve also extended our conceptual reach, bringing us to places which, for thousands of years, we’ve only dreamed about. Philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists have always wondered just how far we could extend the powers of reason and logic. Quantum computing gives us a new way to stand right at the edge of what’s possible, and then to push a little further into the unknown. That’s worth it for its own sake. “It’s an abstract landscape,” Sipser says. “You just want to know what it looks like."
A computer that thinks like the universe - Ideas - The Boston Globe
"Science does not purvey absolute truth, science is a mechanism. It’s a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature, it’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match."
Isaac Asimov on science, creativity, and education in a rare Bill Moyers interview circa 1988 (via taylorlorenz)
<3 asimov
(via wallytheidol)
(via bellcurved)
"‘What is wisdom’ is an exceptional question in that that its primary function is to be recursively asked and not necessarily to be answered in the manner that conventional ‘what’ questions are being answered. In terms of linguistic and semantic utility, wisdom is certainly a unique perhaps even unnatural term because it does not relate or communicate a specific content or even a state of mind. Instead, it invites conscious reflection, openness, and interconnectedness."
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The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history’s more notorious police states and communist countries.
But the bankers on Wall Street don’t live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.
These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don’t want handouts. It’s not a class uprising and they don’t want civil war — they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It’s amazing that some people think that that’s asking a lot.
"Wall Street Isn’t Winning It’s Cheating | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
"Much of our acceptance and effort to push technology forward these days occurs through the need to “normalize” our current states. This notion is closely displayed through the topic of bio-tech, where often the wish for aiding the sick leads the way, rather than a desire to enhance the existing. It seems that advancement is dependent on the immediate need for stabilization and survival. Yet, we do know of a love for life which is free from the need for survival. It is the type of daring love for life that accompanies the human striving to achieve more, to know more, to feel and to taste more. The same kind of striving that has compelled the human to fly the first airplane and travel to the moon; it may even be the driving force that will have the first bionic man compete on the Olympics."
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There’s a reason changing our system of government is slow going. I like to think of the government as a big, complicated machine. We citizens are the users. What we’ve always lacked is a well-designed user interface. That’s not a surprise when you consider the era in which our system was invented. Back then, the user interface for your mule involved a wooden club and language that would offend a pirate.
Voting is such a crude tool that half of the time you can’t tell if you’re voting against your own interests. Change can take years, worthless incumbents are hard to unseat, and elected officials routinely ignore their own campaign promises. Voting has always been a confusing and nearly random user interface for the government machine. Luckily, thanks to the Internet, we have the means to fix our government’s user interface.
"Scott Adams: What If Government Were More Like an iPod? - WSJ.com
"Culture, after all, is fluid. It can change. It happens all the time. The delegates at the Heartland conference know this, which is why they are so determined to suppress the mountain of evidence proving that their worldview is a threat to life on earth. The task for the rest of us is to believe, based on that same evidence, that a very different worldview can be our salvation."
"PROTECT IP (S. 968)/SOPA (HR. 3261) creates the first system for Internet censorship - this bill has sweeping provisions that give the government and corporations leeway and legal cover for taking down sites “by accident,” mistakenly, or for NOT doing “enough” to protect the interests of Hollywood. These bills that are moving very quickly through Congress and can pass before Christmas aim to give the US government and corporations the ability to block sites over infringing links posted by their users and give ISPs the release to take any means to block peoples’ sites, including slowing down your connection."
