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The thesis that we are all nothing more than vehicles for a number of “selfish genes” has accordingly entered deeply into the simian gabble of academic life, where together with materialism and moral relativism it now seems as self-evident as the law of affirmative action.
David Berlinski • The Devil's Delusion
But it is not known whether the principle obscurely described in the specification was applicable in any way to the invisible agency employed in Psycho.The punch line was that the article was signed "John Algernon Clarke." So the author claimed he was mystified by his own creation and couldn't properly determine whether his own patent was a part of
... See moreTeller Jim Steinmeyer • Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear
But for our commonsense notions of human agency and morality to hold, it seems that our actions cannot be merely lawful products of our biology, our conditioning, or anything else that might lead others to predict them.
Sam Harris • Free Will
reliable knowledge of these laws was accessible to human beings if they applied his method of mathematical formulation and systematic experimental testing. As he put it, ‘the Book of Nature is written in mathematical symbols’. This was in conscious comparison with that other Book on which it was more conventional to rely.
David Deutsch • The Fabric of Reality
This was called the ‘steady state’ theory. But it did not answer my naive question either: supposing it had always been here, how did it happen always to have been here?
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
You might ask why we cannot teach physics by just giving the basic laws on page one and then showing how they work in all possible circumstances, as we do in Euclidean geometry, where we state the axioms and then make all sorts of deductions. (So, not satisfied to learn physics in four years, you want to learn it in four minutes?) We cannot do it
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