Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes

In the realm of strong A.I. or in the realm of human consciousness, I think that it's been something that troubles humans or forces us to look at it over and over for millennia, or as long as we've really been conscious, because there is no answer. There is no explanation for us, even for a one percent grip to hold on to. So we just don't know why we're here, we don't know how consciousness is created.

Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

Antonio Damasio is a distinguished neuroscientist with a flair for writing about science and an enthusiasm for philosophizing.

Lichtenberg ... held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. ... It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was "strange" (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations.

No study has taken so much of human energy, whether in times past or present, as the study of the soul, of God, and of human destiny.

What are you, Rose Hathaway? Are you real? You're a dream within a dream. I'm afraid touching you will make me wake up. You'll disappear.

If there is no intelligence in the universe, then the universe has created something greater than itself-for it has created you and me.

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

As human beings, don't we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?

My point of view actually on artificial intelligence, which ties into the nature for humans constantly looking into the reasons for why we exist and why consciousness exists changed during the making of Chappie. And I'm not actually completely sure that humans are going to be capable of giving birth to A.I. in the way that films fictionalize it.

Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.

Without ego I don't know how identity works, I don't know... I need to sit down and re-read some philosophy or something.

The realization that life is absurdand cannot be an end, but only abeginning. This is a truth nearly allgreat minds have taken as their starting point.

"What is the meaning of life?" This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

The Man That Knowz Something Knowz That He Knowz Nothing At All.

It could be anything. It could be Jesus and it could be the Furby and it could be the lint that lives in my navel, but it's probably not. Whatever it is, I doubt we as humans on Earth could have any perception of it while we're here. So, why give yourself a headache thinking about it. Just be a good person. That's what an ethicist is.

We are all students of the world; frail embodied consciousnesses struggling to understand, and be a meaningful part of this great, mysterious gift of life.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

Alas! What is man? Whether he be deprived of that light which is from on high, of whether he discard it, a frail and trembling creature; standing on time, that bleak and narrow isthmus between two eternities, he sees nothing but impenetrable darkness on the one hand, and doubt, distrust, and conjecture, still more perplexing, on the other. Most gladly would he take an observation, as to whence he has come, or whither he is going; alas, he has not the means: his telescope is too dim, his compass too wavering, his plummet too short.

I think, therefore I am ... not here.