Daniel Callahan Quotes

I make short films, little documentaries, about the co-evolution of humans and technology.

The most human thing about us is our technology.

I like to think there is something deep in our own world of reality that will create a dynamic balance between technology and human existence, the relationship between which has a decisive effect on contemporary cultural forms and social structure.

Is the earth in our head? Or do we stand on the earth?

I learned life were no dream I learned truth deceived Man is not God Life is a century Death an instant

We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be –the mythologized epitome of a savage ruthless killer – which is, in reality, no more than a reflected image of ourself.

Science is not just there for technology. It's part of what addressing who you are in the universe and understanding your place in the cosmos. Good art, good literature, good music - all of that is for that and science is a part of it.

Of all the animal creations of God, main is the only animal who has been created in order that he may know his Maker. Man's aim is life is not therefore to add from day to day to his material prospects and to his material possessions, but his predominant calling is, from day to day to come nearer to his own Maker.

This virtual reality stuff is the technological equivalent, really, of psychedelics.

In a civilized and cultivated country wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen. the excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wild life, are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.

Cyberspace is an accident of the real. Virtual reality is the accident of reality itself.

People are the quintessential element in all technology... Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.

The world we are born into-this complicated, difficult, hauntingly touching world-is the one whole thing. It is the world we awaken in, and awaken to.

"To be is to do," says the existentialist. "One only becomes real (human) at the point of action."

I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can't conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can't understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains They could be staring us in the face and we just Don't recognise them. The problem is that we-re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology.

I never, for instance, have the urge to paint animals 'the way I see them,' but rather the way they are... The way they themselves look at the world and feel their being

Art used to be painting, sculpture, music, etc, but now, all technology has become art. Of course, this form of art is still very primitive, but it is slowly replacing reality.

There is no escape from mystery. It is the character of our being.

Man is unique in that, unlike animals, he knows he is going to die, and unlike animals he can do something about it.

It's possible for me to imagine a generation of people maybe two generations removed from you who might decide that we have an adversarial relationship with technology.

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.

Years of cultural programming have taught us to love some animals while eating others, when in all reality, all animals are sentient beings with the capacity to feel, both physically and emotionally.

Virtual reality is just air guitar writ large.

There cannot be an animal body without a territorial body: three bodies are grafted over each other: the territorial body - the planet, the social body - the couple, and the animal body - you and me. And technology splits this unity, leaving us without a sense of where we are. This, too, is de-realization.