Quotes

That we could not consistently deny our existence without going mad is no evidence for the claim that we do exist—any more than the impossibility of denying consistently that we have free will without going mad is evidence for our actually having it. Why should the truth be believable? For all we know, the true account of what we are might be pathological. That would be a truly absurd situation. It is one thing to accept humbly that our metaphysical nature might remain forever beyond our intellectual grasp. It would be a nasty surprise indeed if we could work out our metaphysical nature all right, but the knowledge of it would inevitably result in madness.

Eric T. Olson, What are we?: a study in personal ontology, Oxford, 2007, p. 210

El frío de la tristeza es como un cosquilleo en el estómago que me recorre la columna, las piernas, y por fin se instala cómodo en el pecho, en la garganta. El sol comienza a bajar y sé que es la señal.

Adrián Cangi (ed.), Favio: sinfonía de un sentimiento, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 30

The unpleasantness of a toothache and the pleasantness of a beautiful view are not likely to coexist—not so much because the two hedonic tones have opposite signs, but rather because the two underlying experiences or attitudes are incompatible. The pain so “absorbs me” that I cannot give myself over to the view enough really to enjoy it, or, on the other hand, the view may absorb me away from the pain. For two attitudes or absorptions thus to detract from each other, it is not at all necessary that the two hedonic tones be opposite. I have made experiments like the following: while listening to the marche funèbre in Beethoven’s Seventh, I ate a piece of delicious candy and observed whether I could maintain the two enjoyments unimpaired alongside each other. It was impossible.

Karl Duncker, On pleasure, emotion, and striving, Philosophy and phenomenological research, vol. 1, no. 4, 1941, pp. 391–430, p. 409

The [current] system [of licensing medicines] was created to deal with traditional medicine which ais to prevent, detect, cure, or mitigate diseases. In this framework, there is no room for enhancing medicine. For example, drug companies could find it difficult to get regulatory approval for a pharmaceutical whose sole use is to improve cognitive functioning in the healthy population. To date, every pharmaceutical on the market that offers some potential cognitive enhancement effect was developed to treat some specific disease condition (such as ADHD, narcolepsy and Alzheimer’s disease). The enhancing effects of these drugs in healthy subjects is a serendipitous unintended effect. As a result, pharmaceutical companies, instead of aiming directly at enhancements for healthy people, must work indirectly by demonstrating that their drugs are effective in treating some recognised disease. One perverse effect of this incentive structure is the medicalization and “pathologization” of conditions that were previously regarded as part of the normal human spectrum. If a significant fraction of the population could obtain certain benefits from drugs that improve concentration, for example, it is currently necessary to categorize this segment of people as having some disease in order for the drug to be approved and prescribed to those who could benefit from it. It is not enough that people would like to be able to concentrate better when they work; they must be stamped as suffering from attention0deficit hyperactivity disorder: a condition now estimated to affect between 3 and 5 percent of school-age children (a higher proportion among boys) in the US. This medicalizatoin of arguably normal human characteristics not only stigmatizes enhancers, it also limits access to enhancing treatments; unless people are diagnosed with a condition whose treatment requires a certain enhancing drug, those who wish to use the drug for its enhancing effects are reliant on dinging a sympathetic physical willing to prescribe it (or finding other means of procurement). This creates inequities in access, since those with high social capital and the relevant information are more likely to gain access to enhancement than others.

Nick Bostrom and Rebecca Roache, Ethical issues in human enhancement, in Jesper Ryberg, Thomas S. Petersen, and Clark Wolf (eds.) New waves in applied ethics, London, 2007, pp. 120–152

[T]he Utilitarian cannot confine himself to a single mind; he has to consider what he calls “the total happiness of a collection of minds”. Now this is an extremely odd notion. It is plain that a collection cannot literally be happy or unhappy. The oddity is clearly illustrated if we […] use the analogy of greyness. Suppose that a number of different areas, which are not adjoined to each other, all go through successive phases of greyness. What could we possibly mean by “the total whiteness of this collection of areas”?

C. D. Broad, Five types of ethical theory, London, 1930, pp. 248-249

Do you know someone you would like to change and regulate and improve? Good! That is fine. I am all in favour of it. But why not begin on yourself? From a purely selfish standpoint, that is a lot more profitable than trying to improve others—yes, and a lot less dangerous.

Dale Carnegie, How to win friends and influence people, New York, 1981, p. 1

Se podría decir que hay anomia cuando la observancia contrafáctica […] de una determinada norma en un cierto grupo social sería eficiente en el sentido de que ese estado de observancia sería Pareto-óptima respecto de cualquier otra situación posible, incluyendo a la situación real de inobservancia, o sea en ese estado nadie estaría peor y alguno por lo menos estaría mejor. […] Sin embargo, este criterio no es operativo si tomamos […], como parte del grupo social relevante y como partícipes en la acción colectiva, a individuos que tienen propósitos lógicamente incompatibles con los de los demás. Por ejemplo, supongamos que algunos disfruten del caos de las calles porteñas, ya que lo consideran un sustituto gratuito del juego de los autos chocadores de los parques de diversiones.

Carlos Santiago Nino, Un país al margen de la ley: Estudio de la anomia como componente del subdesarrollo argentino, Buenos Aires, 1992, pp. 37-38

Eloquence and substance are what we should strive for in any form of expression.

John Paul Schaefer and Ansel Adams, The Ansel Adams guide, book 1: basic techniques of photography, Boston, 1999, p. 5

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the woods, Boston, 1854

The mind of the opposite sex is an exotic dark continent at age 15, a partly-explored colony at age 35, and an over-familiar garden at age 55.

Glenn Geher and Geoffrey Miller (eds.), Mating intelligence: Sex, relationships, and the mind's reproductive system, New York London, 2008, p. 378

It seems to me that there is a quality, which we cannot define but are perfectly well acquainted with, which may be called “Hedonic Tone”. It has the two determinate forms of pleasantness and unpleasantness.

C. D. Broad, Five types of ethical theory, London, 1930, p. 229

Temperamentally, I am strongly inclined toward materialist reductive explanation, and I have no strong spiritual or religious inclinations. For a number of years, I hoped for a materialist theory; when I gave up on this hope, it was quite reluctantly. It eventually seemed plain to me that these conclusions were forced on anyone who wants to take consciousness seriously. Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides.

By now, I have grown almost happy with these conclusions. They do not seem to have any fearsome consequences, and they allow a way of thinking and theorizing about consciousness that seems more satisfactory in almost every way. And the expansion in the scientific worldview has had a positive effect, at least for me: it has made the universe seem a more interesting place.

David J. Chalmers, The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory, Oxford, 1996, p. xiv

It is an ironic fact that the felt qualities of conscious experience, perhaps the only things that ultimately matter to us, are often relegated in the rest of philosophy to the status of ‘secondary qualities,’ in the shadowy zone between the real and the unreal, or even jettisoned outright as artifacts of confused minds.

Jaegwon Kim, Physicalism, or something near enough, Princeton Oxford, 2005, p. 12

[W]hile no one who is sane will deny that an experience of pain has certain relational features (e.g. other things being equal, one who is experiencing pain will act for the purpose that the pain be mitigated), no one who is sane will hold that an experience of pain is nothing more than its relational features. After all, pain feels a certain way. It has an intrinsic nature for which the only adequate description is that it hurts. And it is precisely because pain has this kind of intrinsic nature that it also has the relational features that it has. It is this irreducible, intrinsic qualitative nature of pain that modern philosophical orthodoxy is intent on either reducing to something else or outright eliminating. Were their efforts to prove successful, there would be no problem of evil because there would be no quale that is evil.

William Lane Craig and James Porter Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell companion to natural theology, Chichester, U.K. ; Malden, MA, 2009, pp. 449-450

Consistent with Bentham’s ideal of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”, the quality of our world or universe (QW) could be assessed in terms of the ratio or quotient of the magnitude of the sum total of the subjective well-being (SWB) scores of everyone in the world or universe divided by the standard deviation of the distribution of all of the SWB scores.

In a similar way as the Dow Jones Index provides a means of assessing broad-based economic strength, this ratio, the QW, would provide a means of assessing broad-based (ideally universal) happiness and other aspects of SQB. It might also serve as a means of determining whether or not the lot of humankind were actually improving over time, that is, whether or not the changes which will come about in the world will actually be constructive. The larger the value of QW, the more worthwhile, humanistic, and heavenly we could consider our world to be.

Lewis Mancini, Brain stimulation to treat mental illness and enhance human learning, creativity, performance, altruism, and defenses against suffering, Medical hypotheses, vol. 21, no. 2, 1986, pp. 209–219, p. 217

Just as it is possible to dissociate energy growth from GNP growth, it is possible to dissociate GNP growth from welfare growth. The latter separation could be brought about by the abolition of the positional goods that are so important in modern economies. If everyone is motivated by the desire to be ahead of the others, then everybody will have to run as fast as they can in order to remain at the same place. Without any change in preferences, welfare levels could be raised if everyone agreed to abstain from this course. By contrast, most proposals to distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘false’, or ‘natural’ and ‘social needs’, imply that preferences should be changed—which immediately raises the spectre of paternalism. One should not confuse the needs that are social in their object (positional goods) with needs that are social in their origin.

Jon Elster, Risk, uncertainty and nuclear power, Social Science Information, vol. 18, no. 3, 1979, pp. 371–400, p. 378

Let us not think in the authoritarian terms of some individuals genetically engineering the characteristics of others. Instead, let us think in the egalitarian terms of each individual genetically re-engineering herself/himself according as s(he) pleases. What is being suggested here is that in the distant future, by means of in vivo genetic transformation techniques effected with recombinant DNA or some other biotechnological tool(s), it will be possible for any person (or other kind of organism) to be an introverted, academically-oriented, purple-haired, orange-eyed, 10 foot tall white male with an IQ of 160 on any given day and a party-going, humorous, green-haired, green-eyed, three foot tall green female with an IQ of 200 on the next day. Stated in more general terms, it will become possible for each one of us (that is, anyone alive during the future era in question) to be whatever we want to be whenever we want to be.

Lewis Mancini, Riley-Day Syndrome, brain stimulation and the genetic engineering of a world without pain, Medical hypotheses, vol. 31, no. 3, 1990, pp. 201–207, pp. 206-207

Many believers in animal rights and the relevance of animal welfare do not critically examine their basic assumptions […]. Typically these individuals hold two conflicting views. The first view is that animal welfare counts, and that people should treat animals as decently as possible. The second view is a presumption of human non0interference with nature, as much as possible. […] [T]he two views are less compatible than is commonly supposed. If we care about the welfare and rights of individual animals, we may be led to interfere with nature whenever the costs of doing so are sufficiently low.

Tyler Cowen, Policing nature, Environmental ethics, vol. 25, no. 2, 2003, pp. 169–182

In the littered field of discredited self-congratulatory chauvinisms, there is only one that seems to hold up, one sense in which we are special: Due to our own actions or inactions, and the misuse of our technology, we live at an extraordinary moment, for the Earth at least-the first time that a species has become able to wipe itself out. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars. The two times, brought about by the same technology, coincide—a few centuries in the history of a 4.5-billion-year-old planet. If you were somehow dropped down on the Earth randomly at any moment in the past (or future), the chance of arriving at this critical moment would be less than 1 in10 million. Our leverage on the future is high just now.

Carl Sagan, Pale blue dot: A vision of the human future in space, New York, 1994, p. 305

Parecen ignorarse, uno al otro, pero sin furia ni irritación: más bien como si la larga convivencia los hubiera ido cerrando tanto a cada uno en sí mismo que ponen al otro en completo olvido y si casi siempre dicen los dos lo mismo no es porque se influyan mutuamente sino porque reflexionan los dos por separado a partir del mismo estímulo y llegan a la misma conclusión.

Juan José Saer, El limonero real, Barcelona, 1974, pp. 52-53