Quotes
If reconstructive uploading will eventually be possible, how can one ensure that it happens? There have been billions of humans in the history of the planet. It is not clear that our successors will want to reconstruct every person who ever lived, or even every person of whom there are records. So if one is interested in immortality, how can one maximize the chances of reconstruction? One might try keeping a bank account with compound interest to pay them for doing so, but it is hard to know whether our financial system will be relevant in the future, especially after an intelligence explosion.
My own strategy is to write about a future of artificial intelligence and about uploading. Perhaps this will encourage our successors to reconstruct me, if only to prove me wrong.
David J. Chalmers, Uploading: A philosophical analysis, in Russell Blackford and Damien Broderick (eds.) Intelligence unbound: the future of uploaded and machine minds, Chichester, 2014, pp. 102–118, p. 116
Two great maxims emerge from his treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reenforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all.
The second maxim is: Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. […]
A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: Seize the Very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new ‘set’ to the brain.
William James, The laws of habit, The Popular Science Monthly, vol. 30, 1887, pp. 433–451, pp. 55-56
One need not be a consequentialist to find something odd in a Kantian’s proposal to donate $100 to a famine relief organization she happens to know is especially inefficient when there is a more efficient organization that will save more people standing by.
D. Moller, Should we let people starve - for now?, Analysis, vol. 66, no. 3, 2006, pp. 240–247, pp. 244
For Gracias, the Tesla and SpaceX investor and Musk’s friend, the 2008 period told him everything he would ever need to know about Musk’s character. He saw a man who arrived in the United States with nothing, who had lost a child, who was being pilloried in the press by reporters and his ex-wife and who verged on having his life’s work destroyed. “He has the ability to work harder and endure more stress than anyone I’ve ever met,” Gracias said. “What he went through in 2008 would have broken anyone else. He didn’t just survive. He kept working and stayed focused.” That ability to stay focused in the midst of a crisis stands as one of Musk’s main advantages over other executives and competitors. “Most people who are under that sort of pressure fray,” Gracias said. “Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyperrational. He’s still able to make very clear, long-term decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets. Anyone who saw what he went through firsthand came away with more respect for the guy. I’ve just never seen anything like his ability to take pain.”
Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk, Ciudad de México, 2015, pp. 211-212
Any country which displays more than one statue of the same living politician is a country which is headed for trouble.
Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, New York, 1995, p. 425
As to why God had singled out John D. Rockefeller for such spectacular bounty, Rockefeller always adverted to his own adherence to the doctrine of stewardship—the notion of the wealthy man as a mere instrument of God, a temporary trustee of his money, who devoted it to good causes. “It has seemed as if I was favored and got increase because the Lord knew that I was going to turn around and give it back.” Rockefeller said this in his late seventies, and one wonders whether the equation between moneymaking and money giving only entered his mind later. Yet even as a teenager, he took palpable pleasure in distributing money for charitable purposes, and he insisted that from an early date he discerned the intimate spiritual link between earning and dispensing money. “I remember clearly when the financial plan—if I may call it so— of my life was formed. It was out in Ohio, under the ministration of a dear old minister, who preached, ‘Get money: get it honestly and then give it wisely.’ I wrote that down in a little book.” This echoed John Wesley’s dictum, “If those who ‘gain all they can’ and ‘save all they can,’ will likewise ‘give all they can,’ then the more they will grow in grace.”
Ron Chernow, Titan: the Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., New York, 1998, p. 55
In this paper I have criticized AI researchers very harshly. Let me express my faith that people in other fields would, on inspection, be found to suffer from equally bad faults. Most AI workers are responsible people who are aware of the pitfalls of a difficult field and produce good work in spite of them. However, to say anything good about anyone is beyond the scope of this paper.
Drew McDermott, Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity, ACM SIGART Bulletin, no. 57, 1976, pp. 4–9, p. 9
Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be. It is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should. Tame it though we may try, sex has a recurring tendency to wreak havoc across our lives: it leads us to destroy our relationships, threatens our productivity and compels us to stay up too late in nightclubs talking to people whom we don’t like but whose exposed midriffs we nevertheless strongly wish to touch. Sex remains in absurd, and perhaps irreconcilable, conflict with some of our highest commitments and values.
Alain De Botton and The School of Life, Toolkit for Life 1: 6 Guides for Life. How to think more about sex / Alain de Botton, Toolkit for Life 1: 6 Guides for Life. How to think more about sex / Alain de Botton, London, 2012, pp. 5-6
The title of this book encapsulates my reasoning. It’s taken from the English edition of Asterix the Gaul. The indomitable Gaul has just bashed some Roman legionaries. One of the Romans says, dazedly: ‘Vae victo, vae victis.’ Another observes: ‘We decline.’ The caption above this scene of destruction reads: ‘Accidence will happen.’
You have to believe me that this is funny. The first legionary’s Latin phrase means: ‘Woe to the one who has been vanquished, woe to those who have been vanquished.’ The scene is a riff on grammar. It was made up by Anthea Bell, the English translator of the Asterix books. She is my mother and I have stolen her joke. I’ll render it leaden by explaining why it appeals to me. Victo is the dative singular and victis is the dative plural. The legionary is literally declining, in the grammatical sense. The aspect of grammar that deals with declension and conjugation is called accidence.
Oliver Kamm, Accidence will happen: The non-pedantic guide to English usage, London, 2015, p. x-xi
In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond suggested that geography, botany, and zoology were destiny. Europe and Asia pressed ahead economically, and remained ahead to the present day, because of accidents of geography. They had the kinds of animals that could be domesticated, and the orientation of the Eurasian land mass allowed domesticated plants and animals to spread easily between societies. But there is a gaping lacuna in his argument. In a modern world in which the path to riches lies through industrialization, why are bad-tempered zebras and hippos the barrier to economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa? Why didn’t the Industrial Revolution free Africa, New Guinea, and South America from their old geographic disadvantages, rather than accentuate their backwardness? And why did the takeover of Australia by the British propel a part of the world that had not developed settled agriculture by 1800 into the first rank among developed economies?
Gregory Clark, A farewell to alms: A brief economic history of the world, Princeton, 2007, pp. 13-14
Ich bin zwar im täglichen Leben ein typischer Einspänner, aber das Bewusstsein, der unsichtbaren Gemeinschaft derjenigen anzugehören, die nach Wahrheit, Schönheit und Gerechtigkeit streben, hat das Gefühl der Vereinsamung nicht aufkommen lassen.
Albert Einstein, Mein Glaubensbekenntnis, 1932
Once you learn how to learn, you have only to discover what is worth learning.
W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis, New York, 1974, p. 71
[I]f you haven’t found at least one major drawback to whatever proposal you think should be adopted, you might want to dig deeper into the complexities at play.
[A]s a blog author, while I realize that blog posts can be part of a balanced intellectual diet, I worry that I tempt readers to fill their intellectual diet with too much of the fashionably new, relative to the old and intellectually nutritious. Until you reach the state of the art, and are ready to be at the very forefront of advancing human knowledge, most of what you should read to get to that forefront isn’t today’s news, or even today’s blogger musings. Read classic books and articles, textbooks, review articles. Then maybe read focused publications (including perhaps some blog posts) on your chosen focus topic(s).
Since his philosophical writing adopted selflessness and self-abnegation, whereas Schopenhauer himself led the life of a self-centered curmudgeon in affluent comfort, the charge of hypocrisy and inconsistency was made against him.
Schopenhauer replied that it sufficed for a philosopher to examine the human condition and determine the best form of life for man: that he should also provide an example of it in his own proceedings was asking far too much.
Schopenhauer vividly illustrates the irony of the human condition where all too often the intellect acknowledges the advantage of going where the will is unwilling to follow. And since this tension between intellect and will was the keystone of his philosophy, Schopenhauer’s proceedings did perhaps manage after all to provide that example of living by one’s doctrine.
Nicholas Rescher, A journey through philosophy in 101 anecdotes, Pittsburgh, 2015, p. 167
The problems which most perplex tennis players are not those deal- ing with the proper way to swing a racket. Books and professionals giving this information abound. Nor do most players complain excessively about physical limitations. The most common com- plaint of sportsmen ringing down the corridors of the ages is, “It’s not that I don’t know what to do, it’s that I don’t do what I know!”
W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis, New York, 1974, p. 13
[T]he average number of deaths from poverty each day is equivalent to 100 jumbo jets, each carrying 500 people (mostly children), crashing with no survivors. From a human perspective, severe poverty should be the top story in every newspaper, ever newscast, and every news website, every day.
Thomas Pogge & Leif Wenar Patricia Illingworth (ed.), Giving Well, 2011, p. 104
[W]hile the problem of interpersonal comparability of utility is a tricky one, it is not insoluble in principle. It is conceivable that, perhaps several hundred (or a thousand) years from now, neurology may have advanced to the stage where the level of happiness can be accurately correlated to some cerebral reaction that can be measured by a ‘eudaimonometer’. Hence the definition of social welfare [in terms of the sum total of individual happiness] is an objective definition, although the objects are the subjective feelings of individuals.
Yew-Kwang Ng, Welfare economics: towards a more complete analysis, London, 2004, p. 4
Looking back, […] almost every war every country has fought was a mistake. When we consider fighting a new war, we are tempted to believe this war is an exception to the rule. But this belief is itself unexceptional.
Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: what everyone needs to know, Oxford, 2012, pp. 80-81
Lyndon Johnson was a master of self-justification. According to his biographer Robert Caro, when Johnson came to believe in something, he would believe in it “totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter.” George Reedy, one of Johnson’s aides, said that he “had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act… He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ’truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.” Although Johnson’s supporters found this to be a rather charming aspect of the man’s character, it might well have been one of the major reasons that Johnson could not extricate the country from the quagmire of Vietnam. A president who justifies his actions only to the public might be induced to change them. A president who has justified his actions to himself, believing that he has the truth, becomes impervious to self-correction.
Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Bbeliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, Florida, 2007, p. 7