Halil Babilli > Halil's Quotes

“The best way to get cooperation among volatile, erotic primates is to regulate sexual relations—who can mate with whom, who can live with whom regularly, and so on. By setting up such customs and marriage taboos you establish families and provide sexual partners between families. In a word, the invention of sexual codes establishes harmony and cooperation in mating units, and in bands composed of such units.”
― Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man

“These are, in sum, the two great uniquenesses of human life—regularized food-sharing and cooperation with others—and they are unknown among the subhuman primates.”
― Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man

“None can sleep more soundly than a Turk, when the Turk has a good digestion and an easy conscience. This was the case with Kéraban, and many attempts were made to rouse him.”
― Jules Verne, Jules Verne: The Collection

“The Kalmucks are small of stature, but robust; excellent horsemen, quick, agile, and smart. Their food is a little flour, mixed with water, and cooked with horseflesh. But they are confirmed drunkards, skilful thieves, ignorant, superstitious to excess, incorrigible gamblers, like all the nomads of the Caucasian steppes.”
― Jules Verne, Jules Verne: The Collection

“A curious country,” writes Van Mitten in his note-book, as he hastily jotted down some random impressions of the journey. “The women work in the fields and carry burthens, while the men spin flax and knit in wool.” The worthy Dutchman was not mistaken: such are still the customs in the distant province of Lazistan, where the second portion of the journey was commenced.”
― Jules Verne, Jules Verne: The Collection

“But his wife was long gone, of course, struck down by cancer: the result of a random cosmic accident, a heavy particle that had come whizzing out of an ancient supernova and flown across the universe to damage her just so … It could have been him; it could have been neither of them; it could have happened a few years later, when cancer had been reduced to a manageable disease. But it hadn’t worked out like that, and Malenfant, burned out, already grounded, had been left alone.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“This is the way I think the world will end—with general giggling by all the witty heads, who think it is a joke.’ Kierkegaard.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“Brains, unlike any machine, have not been designed. They are organs that have evolved for over five hundred million years, so there is little or no reason to expect they truly function like the machines we create.”
― Matthew Cobb, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience

“Another route by which Galen’s ideas were transmitted during this period was through the work of the tenth-century physician ‘Alī ibn al-’Abbās Maǧūsī, known in the West as Haly Abbas–a historian has described him as ‘a Persian who took an Arab name and wrote in the language of the Qu’ran, a Zoroastrian who was imbibed with Greek traditions, a thinker from the Islamic world who was adopted by the Western Latin community less than a century after his death’.To emphasise the cosmopolitan mix of this period, his work was subsequently translated into Latin in Italy by a Christian monk who had been a Muslim refugee from North Africa.”
― Matthew Cobb, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience

“After you’re gone? Poor Malenfant. I know what’s really bothering you. It’s not that the question is unanswered. It’s the idea that you won’t be around when the answer comes. You always did think you were the center of everything, Malenfant. You can’t stand to think that the universe will go on without you.” “Doesn’t everybody feel that way?” “Actually, no, not everybody, Malenfant. And you know what? The universe will go on. You don’t have to save it. It doesn’t need you to keep space expanding or the stars shining. We’ll keep on finding out new stuff, visiting new places, finding new answers,”
― Stephen Baxter, Manifold: Origin

“After you’re gone? Poor Malenfant. I know what’s really bothering you. It’s not that the question is unanswered. It’s the idea that you won’t be around when the answer comes. You always did think you were the center of everything, Malenfant. You can’t stand to think that the universe will go on without you.” “Doesn’t everybody feel that way?” “Actually, no, not everybody, Malenfant. And you know what? The universe will go on. You don’t have to save it. It doesn’t need you to keep space expanding or the stars shining. We’ll keep on finding out new stuff, visiting new places, finding new answers, even when you aren’t around to make it happen.”
― Stephen Baxter, Manifold: Origin

“One path to this view begins with an accident, a case of carbon monoxide poisoning from a shower’s bad water heater in 1988, which led to a case of brain damage in a woman known only as “DF.” As a result of the accident, DF felt almost blind. She lost all experience of the shapes and layout of objects in her visual field. Only vague patches of color remained. Despite this, it turned out that she could still act quite effectively toward the objects in space around her. For example, she could post letters through a slot that was placed at various different angles. But she could not describe the angle of the slot, or indicate it by pointing. As far as subjective experience goes, she couldn’t see the slot at all, but the letter reliably went in.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life

“One way to deal with the problem is with the “efference copy” mechanisms I described earlier. As you move, you send a signal to the parts of yourself that deal with perception, telling them to ignore some of what comes in: “Don’t worry, that’s just me.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life

“Hamilton died in 2000, after catching malaria on a trip to Africa to investigate the origins of HIV. About a decade before his death, he wrote about how he would like his own burial to go. He wanted his body carried to the forests of Brazil and laid out to be eaten from the inside by an enormous winged Coprophanaeus beetle using his body to nurture its young, who would emerge from him and fly off. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra [wing covers] which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life

“The monocropped forest was a disaster for peasants who were now deprived of all the grazing, food, raw materials, and medicines that the earlier forest ecology had afforded.”
― James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

“The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“LEADERS ARE VISIONARIES WITH A POORLY DEVELOPED SENSE OF FEAR AND NO CONCEPT OF THE ODDS AGAINST THEM.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Then I’ve got some bad news for you. Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“The world of tomorrow will be a place where factories grow their outputs locally, almost like farms in previous eras. Drones and robots will be ubiquitous. The human genome will be an elastic thing, and so, necessarily, will be the very idea of the human itself. Life spans will be much longer than our own. Many will disappear almost entirely into virtual worlds. What once seemed a settled social contract will contort and buckle. Learning to live and thrive in this world is going to be a part of everyone’s life in the twenty-first century.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave

“For example: peace. Consider an ideological development that favored more peaceful relations between groups and individuals: a doctrine of love thy neighbor; or improved norms for conflict resolution that allowed more disagreements to be settled through reasoned debate and compromise rather than by fist or sword. What could be more benign? And yet… such improvements may actually have had a negative effect on average well-being, by making the equilibrium one in which the deaths necessary to maintain the human population at a given size are produced by grinding poverty, chronic malnutrition, and physiological exhaustion, rather than by the occasional axe-through-the-skull among people who at other times live in ease and comfort.”
― Nick Bostrom, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World

“But what if AI, while acting as an economic equalizer, sends the cost of intelligence, and therefore of labor, plummeting toward zero? That would conclude the brief but wonderfully productive period of human history that has allowed individuals in free societies to improve their circumstances, should they so choose, by their own efforts.”
― Eric Schmidt, Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit

“American writer Jack London declares triumphantly: “The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”5 For others, writes Tolstoy (quoting Socrates), “We move closer to the truth only to the extent that we move further from life.”
― Eric Schmidt, Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit

“It’s more accurate to say that the laws of physics transcend space and time; they exist in a mathematical realm that is not part of the physical universe. Some distinguished scientists do indeed take that position. They argue that in the matter of existence, the set of physical laws are the primary entity and have within them universe-creating capabilities.”
― Paul C.W. Davies, What's Eating the Universe? And Other Cosmic Questions

“In their book Power and Progress”
― Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination