Trevor Paglen Quotes

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

Common sense says that chairs and tables exist independently of whether anyone happens to perceive them or not.

I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.

Portray the world for what it is, and you will find truth.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Whoever says he is starting from a given in nature may be right, and so is he who says he is starting from nothing!

Einstein said, if everything exists as a substance of qualities, and qualities exist only in mind, then all is mind.

To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.

There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.

The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

Subjectivity and objectivity commit a series of assaults on each other during a human life out of which the first one suffers the worse beating.

We must see conditions as they really are, not as we want them to be.

Remember, we see the world not as it is but as we are. Most of us see through the eyes of our fears and our limiting beliefs and our false assumptions.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

There are only two types of people in the world. There are the people who understand that this is a matrix, and then there are the people who buy it lock, stock and barrel.

'Do not touch ontologically' doesn't mean 'are separated by empirically measurable hard edges.'