Timothy Morton Quotes

Modern physics often advances only by sacrificing some of our traditional philosophical convictions

So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.

Nothing puzzles me more than the time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less.

Metaphysics is a science.

We might be allowed to... assert that because our only cognitions of matter are cognitions of force, matter in the scientific sense is force.

I've loved physics from a young age, but I've also been interested in all sorts of big questions, from philosophy to evolution and neuroscience. And what those fields have in common is that they all aim to capture certain aspects of the same underlying universe.

To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist?"

...physics is the study of the structure of consciousness.

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

Whence? wither? why? how? - these questions cover all philosophy.

The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.

Solipsism may be logically consistent with present Quantum Mechanics, Monism in the sense of Materialism is not.

I'm very passionate about philosophy and religion.

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.

So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized, needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe, and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history.

Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

Philosophy is an attempt by man to find cause and effect. Religion has the same goal.

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion: some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic.

The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.

I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.

Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

… theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics.