Rudy Rucker Quotes

There's almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.

I think a lot of people in their average day actually imagine two sides of a conversation at one point or another. I think that the mental trick of holding two sides of a conversation in your head is actually something that we all do.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

I cannot remember a time when the question of why people behave as they do was not intensely interesting to me. The desire to understand was very important. When I was young, I was aware of the fact that much of the time, the reasons a person gave for his actions were not the actual reasons.

The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

We all have mental models: the lens through which we see the world that drive our responses to everything we experience. Being aware of your mental models is key to being objective.

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.

I can intellectualize myself out of anything.

I try to write about internal experience versus the external self. I like to present ideas, but not package them neatly.

I can't turn off the way I think, and that's essentially who I am, who anybody is.

I don't analyze things like titles.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too.

Most don't live inside their heads as a writer does, having conversations with her own ideas.

I've become wary of interviews in which you're forced to go back over the reasons why you made certain decisions. You tend to rationalize what you've done, to intellectually review a process that is often intuitive.

Sometimes, I believe I actually see the wheels in my brain turning.

As human beings, we create belief systems that make us feel happy with the choices we make. You'd have a lot of unhappy people regretting everything if they didn't create the belief system in which they could explain all their choices and feel like they've done the right thing.

WHAT a person thinks is determined by HOW a person thinks.

The ultimate and dearest - and, again, only - relationship we have is the relationship we have with our thoughts.

To understand our own thinking is to understand all thinking.

I gut check my show. I say, I say, "Gut, gut, does that feel true to you?" And Gut says, "Yes it does, Stephen. Let's get a grilled cheese sandwich."

Reason is universal because no attempted challenge to its results can avoid appealing to reason in the end-by claiming, for example, that what was presented as an argument is really a rationalization. This can undermine our confidence in the original method or practice only by giving us reasons to believe something else, so that finally we have to think about the arguments to make up our minds.