Category: Quotes
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Neil Turok on Life
The following quote is from Brian Keating‘s interview with Neil Turok on October 2, 2022: I think, and it may sound strange from a physicist, but I think the most fascinating thing in the universe is Life, and how it’s organized… What is the law that governs life, that tells you that life will emerge?…
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Iain McGilchrist on control
The following quote is from a conversation between Iain McGilchrist and Ameer Shaheed in May 2023. It is part of a series of conversations exploring McGilchrist’s philosophy as laid out in The Matter with Things. (My emphasis in italics.) I would go so far as to say that control, which is the single value of…
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Edward Frenkel on the first person perspective and computation
The following is from Lex Fridman’s interview with Edward Frenkel on April 10, 2023. Edward Frenkel is a mathematician and author of the bestselling book Love and Math. I’m starting to question, why I am not giving as much credibility to my subjective understanding of the world…, the first person perpective… The observer is always…
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Richard Tarnas on listening to the voice of nature
The following is from a session in the Mothership Earth Summit 2023 with Richard Tarnas on March 20, 2023. Richard says we seem to be living at the end of an era. He sees a striking resemblance between fundamental collective transformation and what takes place in individual initiatory rites of passage. Richard Tarnas talks about…
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Stephen Wolfram on Computational Irreducibility
…I strongly suspect…that in the vast majority of cases where the behavior that we see in nature and elsewhere appears to us complex it is in the end indeed associated with computational irreducibility. … In the past it has normally been assumed that there is no ultimate limit on what science can be expected to…
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Christopher Alexander on Pattern Language
Christopher Alexander made his first full-blown pattern language in 1967. After a long time, he realized that something was drastically wrong. Jenny Quillen talks about it here. The quotes below are from Christopher Alexander’s 1979 book The Timeless Way of Building.1 …at the very moment when you first relax,…you will begin to see how limited…
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Bill Plotkin on Purpose
The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin is a thorough description of the most essential things Plotkin has learned over the past 40 years about the journey to full maturity as a human being. Bill Plotkin has the following perspective to share on purpose (my emphasis in italics): Our Soul purpose is categorically different…
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Bill Plotkin on Soul, Felt-sense, and Metaphor
The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin is a thorough description of the most essential things Plotkin has learned over the past 40 years about the journey to full maturity as human beings. Bill Plotkin uses common words in uncommon ways. Soul is, for example, an ecological concept. Soul Bill Plotkin writes (my emphasis…
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Eugene Gendlin on Logic
Logic, math, and graph paper are quintessentially human creations—nothing natural comes in equal units that can be substituted in logical slots. Every leaf and cell is a little different. —Eugene Gendlin The actual order is supralogical. It is more than a given logic can represent, although a given logic can fit some given aspect or…
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Iain McGilchrist on Logic
The following quotes are from Iain McGilchrist’s books The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning, The Master and His Emissary, and The Matter with Things. McGilchrist points out the limits of sequential analytic logic, the building up of knowledge from parts, and the prioritising of detail over the bigger picture. An uncritical following of…