Michael Shermer Quotes

To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.'

This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a view.

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.

To believe that mind is all, that thought is all is only a higher materialism.

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

Nature is thought immersed in matter. . .

Materialist philosophies that treat human beings as machines or animals possess the high ground in our culture - academia, the most powerful media and many of our courts.

Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.

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.

Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else - mind, spirit, morality, meaning - into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.

People into hard sciences, neurophysiology, often ignore a core philosophical question: 'What is the relationship between our unique, inner experience of conscious awareness and material substance?' The answer is: We don't know, and some people are so terrified to say, 'I don't know.'

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

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

The idealist walks on tiptoe, the materialist on his heels.

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.

Metaphysics is a science.

A cold atheistical materialism is the tendency of the so-called material philosophy of the present day.

Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that.

I'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.

I think the body is the ultimate thing. The soul and mind are part of the body. I don't think there is anything outside of that. Your physical self is who you are. Some people feel that that is reductionist, but I don't think it is. It's just true.

Naturalism is a counterpart to theism. Theism says there's the physical world and God. Naturalism says there's only the natural world. There are no spirits, no deities, or anything else.