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This will be a continuously updated post collecting the thoughts of great thinkers both past and current via quotes relating to the Polytopia project.
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. " John Cage
"Civilization is entirely the product of phonetic literacy. As it dissolves with the electronic revolution, we rediscover a tribal integral awareness that manifests itself in a complete shift in our sensory lives....This new electronic environment itself constitutes an inner trip, collectively, without benefit of drugs. The impulse to use hallucinogens is a kind of empathy with the electronic environment." - Marshall McLuhan
"When looking at the future, the “what” is far more predictable than the “when.” And the “how” will always feel different than predicted." - Thomas Frey - Senior Futurist, The DaVinci Institute
“The great global problems of our time—the proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction, the disruption of the environment, etc.—can only be solved
through cooperation and compromise among people with radically different moral
outlooks. And this, I believe, is unlikely to happen so long as the people of the
world hold fast to their respective versions of moral common sense.
What is so terrible about moral common sense? In a phrase, moral
realism. Moral realism is, roughly, the idea that there is a fact of the matter about
what’s right or what’s wrong.”
The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth about Morality and
What to Do About it, Doctoral Dissertation of Joshua D. Greene in the Department of
Philosophy, Princeton University, June 2002. (pdf)
"We need first to understand that the human form - including human desire and all its external representations - may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call post-humanism."
(Prometheus as performer - toward a posthumanist culture, in Michael Benamou/Charles Caramello (Ed.), Performance in postmodern culture, Madison 1977)
"We can't avoid some anthropic component in our science, which is interesting, because after three hundred years we finally realize that we do matter. Our vantage point in the universe is relevant to our science. But it's very easy to misconstrue the anthropic principle, and draw ridiculous conclusions from it. You have to be very careful how you state it. What it is not saying is that our existence somehow exercises a theological or causative compulsion for the universe to have certain laws or certain initial conditions. It doesn't work like that. We're not, by our own existence, creating such a universe."
Paul Davies
“Why spend billions to place a man on the Moon? If we don't, we may lose the Earth. If we do, we may gain the universe. You couldn't ask for better odds.”
I. Asimov
We haven’t worked on ways to develop a higher social intelligence… We need this higher intelligence to operate socially or we’re not going to survive…. If we don’t manage things socially, individual high intelligence is not going to make much difference….
Ordinary thought in society is incoherent - it is going in all sorts of directions, with thoughts conflicting and canceling each other out. But if people were to think together in a coherent way, it would have tremendous power.
David Bohm
"[Our ability to conceptualize] enables us to think such empty thoughts as "This statement is about itself," which is true but useless, or "This statement is not about itself," which is false and useless, or "This statement is false," which is downright paradoxical. Yet the benefit of being able to conceptualize is surely worth the risk that we may sometimes be nonsensical."
Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind. p. 231
Some Notes:
*If you have a quote that you would like to add, please do so in the comment section and I will add it to the main post
*Main pic: Global society can be defined by incorporating concepts from cybernetics, evolutionary theory, and complex adaptive systems and can therefore be seen as a network of self-producing components, and therefore as a living system or “superorganism”.
A superorganism is a higher-order, “living” system, whose components are organisms themselves. (in this case, individual humans and thier technology).
This is an outtake/concept sketch for a full page illustration which was commissioned Focus Magazine on the emergence of a true ‘global’ intelligence.
from : Mondolithic
*some of these quotes have been collected by @Reckon, @XiXidu, @G.Dvorsky
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. " John Cage
"Civilization is entirely the product of phonetic literacy. As it dissolves with the electronic revolution, we rediscover a tribal integral awareness that manifests itself in a complete shift in our sensory lives....This new electronic environment itself constitutes an inner trip, collectively, without benefit of drugs. The impulse to use hallucinogens is a kind of empathy with the electronic environment." - Marshall McLuhan
"When looking at the future, the “what” is far more predictable than the “when.” And the “how” will always feel different than predicted." - Thomas Frey - Senior Futurist, The DaVinci Institute
“The great global problems of our time—the proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction, the disruption of the environment, etc.—can only be solved
through cooperation and compromise among people with radically different moral
outlooks. And this, I believe, is unlikely to happen so long as the people of the
world hold fast to their respective versions of moral common sense.
What is so terrible about moral common sense? In a phrase, moral
realism. Moral realism is, roughly, the idea that there is a fact of the matter about
what’s right or what’s wrong.”
The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth about Morality and
What to Do About it, Doctoral Dissertation of Joshua D. Greene in the Department of
Philosophy, Princeton University, June 2002. (pdf)
"We need first to understand that the human form - including human desire and all its external representations - may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call post-humanism."
(Prometheus as performer - toward a posthumanist culture, in Michael Benamou/Charles Caramello (Ed.), Performance in postmodern culture, Madison 1977)
"We can't avoid some anthropic component in our science, which is interesting, because after three hundred years we finally realize that we do matter. Our vantage point in the universe is relevant to our science. But it's very easy to misconstrue the anthropic principle, and draw ridiculous conclusions from it. You have to be very careful how you state it. What it is not saying is that our existence somehow exercises a theological or causative compulsion for the universe to have certain laws or certain initial conditions. It doesn't work like that. We're not, by our own existence, creating such a universe."
Paul Davies
“Why spend billions to place a man on the Moon? If we don't, we may lose the Earth. If we do, we may gain the universe. You couldn't ask for better odds.”
I. Asimov
We haven’t worked on ways to develop a higher social intelligence… We need this higher intelligence to operate socially or we’re not going to survive…. If we don’t manage things socially, individual high intelligence is not going to make much difference….
Ordinary thought in society is incoherent - it is going in all sorts of directions, with thoughts conflicting and canceling each other out. But if people were to think together in a coherent way, it would have tremendous power.
David Bohm
"[Our ability to conceptualize] enables us to think such empty thoughts as "This statement is about itself," which is true but useless, or "This statement is not about itself," which is false and useless, or "This statement is false," which is downright paradoxical. Yet the benefit of being able to conceptualize is surely worth the risk that we may sometimes be nonsensical."
Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind. p. 231
Some Notes:
*If you have a quote that you would like to add, please do so in the comment section and I will add it to the main post
*Main pic: Global society can be defined by incorporating concepts from cybernetics, evolutionary theory, and complex adaptive systems and can therefore be seen as a network of self-producing components, and therefore as a living system or “superorganism”.
A superorganism is a higher-order, “living” system, whose components are organisms themselves. (in this case, individual humans and thier technology).
This is an outtake/concept sketch for a full page illustration which was commissioned Focus Magazine on the emergence of a true ‘global’ intelligence.
from : Mondolithic
*some of these quotes have been collected by @Reckon, @XiXidu, @G.Dvorsky
Tue, Mar 31, 2009 Permanent link
Categories: quotes, polytopia, futurism, Futures
Sent to project: Polytopia
Categories: quotes, polytopia, futurism, Futures
Sent to project: Polytopia
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