Quotes

Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by the mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in existence.

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Oxford, 1998, pp. 212-213

Pienso que voy a cumplir treinta años. Pienso que debería prestarme un poco de atención. Treinta es un número redondo y peligroso, fácil de recordar, de atribuirle las supersticiones de un límite.

Vlady Kociancich, El templo de las mujeres, Buenos Aires, 1996, p. 24

Cravings can […] be induced by what we may call the secondary rewards from addiction. To explain this idea, let me recall my own experience as a former heavy smoker who quit almost 30 years ago when my consumption reached 40 cigarettes a day. Even today I vividly remember what it was like to organize my whole life around smoking. When things went well, I reached for a cigarette. When things went badly, I did the same. I smoked before breakfast, after a meal, when I had a drink, before doing something difficult, and after doing something difficult. I always had an excuse for smoking. Smoking became a ritual that served to highlight salient aspects of experience and to impose structure on what would otherwise have been a confusing morass of events. Smoking provided the commas, semicolons, question marks, exclamation marks, and full stops of experience. It helped me to achieve a feeling of mastery, a feeling that I was in charge of events rather than submitting to them. This craving for cigarettes amounts to a desire for order and control, not for nicotine.

Jon Elster, Strong feelings: Emotion, addiction, and human behavior, Cambridge, MA, 1999, p. 64

The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: the unity of knowledge, New York, 1999, p. 262

What evolution had done, design could do better. There would always be a chance to take what you needed, take what was good, then cut yourself free and move on.

Greg Egan, Teranesia: Roman, München, 1995, p. 179

This chapter is about the puzzle of swearing—the strange shock and appeal of words like fuck, screw, and come; shit, piss, and fart; cunt, pussy, tits, prick, cock, dick, and asshole; bitch, slut, and whore; bastard, wanker, cocksucker, and motherfucker; hell, damn, and Jesus Christ; faggot, queer, and dyke; and spick, dago, kike, wog, mick, gook, kaffir, and nigger.

Steven Pinker, The stuff of thought: language as a window into human nature, New York, 2007, p. 327

I am autonomous if I rule me, and no one else rules I.

Joel Feinberg, Rights, justice, and the bounds of liberty: essays in social philosophy, Princeton, 1980, p. 19

Suppose you had never heard of Christianity, and that next Sunday morning a stranger standing in a pulpit told you about a book whose authors could not be authenticated and whose contents, written hundreds of years ago, included blood-curdling legends of slaughter and intrigue and fables about unnatural happenings such as births, devils that inhabit human bodies and talk, people rising from the dead and ascending live into the clouds, and suns that stand still. Suppose he then asked you to believe that an uneducated man described in that book was a god who could get you into an eternal fantasy-place called Heaven, when you die. Would you, as an intelligent rational person, even bother to read such nonsense, let alone pattern your entire life upon it?

Ruth Hurmence Green, The Born Again Sleptic's Guide to the Bible, Madison, 1979, p. ii

It is the year 7 billion A.D. The sun has gone into its red giant phase. The Earth has been consumed by the outer envelope of the 100-million-mile-diameter sun. Mars is a dried and lifeless body with a surface temperature sufficient to melt its crustal rocks. Jupiter is a roiling, heater mass rapidly losing gas and material to space. The ice cover of Jupiter’s moon Europa has long since melted away, followed by the disappearance of its oceans to space. Farther away, Saturn has lost its icy rings. But once world of this vast solar system has benefited from the gigantic red orb that is the Sun. It is Saturn’s largest moon, aptly named Titan.

Long before, in the time of humanity, a science fiction writer named Arthur C. Clarke penned a series of tales about the moon of Jupiter named Europa. In these stories, alien beings somehow turned Jupiter into a small but blazing star, and in so doing warmed Europa—and brought about the creation of life. A wonderful, though physically impossible, fable. Now, in these late days of the solar system, the huge red Sun was doing the same to Titan, changing it from frozen to thawed, and in so doing liberating the stuff of life. But Titan was always a very different world than Europa. Like Europa, Titan always had oceans. Frozen, to be sure, but oceans nevertheless. But where Europan oceans were water, those of Titan were of a vastly different substance—ethane. Titan had always been covered with a rich but cold stew of organic materials. And with the coming of heat, for the first time Eden came to Titan. Like a baby born to an impossibly old woman, life came to this far outpost, the last life ever to be evolved in the solar system.

The red giant phase was short-lived—only several hundred million years, in fact. But it was enough. For a short time, for the last time, life bloomed in the solar system. After death, once more came the resurrection of life in masses of tiny bacteria like bodies on a moon once far from a habitable planet called Earth, a place that, in its late age, evolved a species with enough intelligence to predict the future, and be able to prophesize how the world would end.

Peter D. Ward, Peter D. Ward, and Donald Brownlee, The life and death of planet earth: how the new science of astrobiology charts the ultimate fate of our world, New York, NY, 2002, pp. 212-213

I had spent my life waiting for something, not knowing what, not even knowing I waited. Killing time.

Omni, 1985

Sex is like a diamond forged in a slaughterhouse. Three billion years of unconscious reproduction. Half a billion more stumbling towards animals that weren’t just compelled to mate, but were happy to do it–and finally knew that they were happy. Millions of years spent honing that feeling, making it the most perfect thing in the world. And all just because it worked. All just because it churned out more of the same. […] Anyone can take the diamond. It’s there for the asking. But it’s not a lure for us. It’s not a bribe. We’ve stolen the prize, we’ve torn it free. It’s ours to do what we like with.

Greg Egan, Teranesia: Roman, München, 1995, p. 95

—Este asunto de París. No busques una explicación. No hay explicación. Ciertas cosas simplemente suceden.

—Que simplemente suceden ya es una explicación.

Vlady Kociancich, El templo de las mujeres, Buenos Aires, 1996, pp. 140-141

“[T]he conversion of humans to more or less immortal near-gods” that David Friedman describe[s] as the upside of galloping twenty-first-century scientific advance […] seems rather a dubious plus, and certainly less of one than extinction would be a minus, especially since changing us into “near-gods” could be thought itself a form of extinction rather than a boon because of the discontinuity between a person and a near-god. We think of early hominids as having become extinct rather than as having become us.

Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and response, Oxford, 2004, pp. 148-149

Without some basis for believing that the process that produced your prior was substantially better at tracking truth than the process that produced other peoples’ priors, you appear to have no basis for believing that beliefs based on your prior are more accurate than beliefs based on other peoples’ priors.

Robin Hanson, Uncommon priors require origin disputes, Theory and Decision, vol. 61, no. 4, 2006, pp. 319–328, p. 326

[T]he things we have created will eventually vanish once human beings are no longer around to preserve them. However, achievements are events, not things, and events that have occurred cannot be undone or reversed. Therefore, it will continue to be true that our achievements occurred even if humanity ends. One disadvantage of having an unalterable past is that we cannot undo a wrongdoing that occurred. However, an unalterable past is also an advantage in that our achievements can never be undone, which may give some consolation to those who desire quasi-immortality.

Brooke Alan Trisel, Human extinction and the value of our efforts, The Philosophical Forum, vol. 35, no. 3, 2004, pp. 371–391, p. 390

The second law of thermodynamics which, as Jeans delights in pointing out to us, will ultimately bring this universe to an inglorious close, may perhaps always remain the final factor. But by intelligent organizations the life of the Universe could probably be prolonged to many millions of millions of times what it would be without organization.

John Desmond Bernal, The world, the flesh and the devil: an inquiry into the future of the three enemies of the rational soul, London, 1970, p. 28

The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 25-50 million people. World War II killed 60 million people; 107 is the order of the largest catastrophes in humanity’s written history. Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human species, seem to trigger a /different mode of thinking/—enter into a ‘separate magisterium’. People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an existential risk, and say, ‘Well, maybe the human species doesn’t really deserve to survive.’

Eliezer Yudkowsky, Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgement of global risks, in Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković (eds.) Global catastrophic risks, Oxford, 2008, pp. 91–119, p. 114

Some people believe in an afterlife. I do not; what I say will be based on the assumption that death is nothing, and final. I believe there is little to be said for it: it is a great curse, and if we truly face it nothing can make it palatable except the knowledge that by dying we can prevent an even grater evil. Otherwise, given the simple choice between living for another week and dying in five minutes I would always choose to live for another week; and by a version of mathematical induction I conclude that I would be glad to live forever.

Thomas Nagel, The view from nowhere, Oxford, 1986, p. 224

A simple thought experiment suggests that humans are earth-life’s best bet. In this experiment there are three key factors: the probability that humans can avoid extinction and transcend oblivion; the probability that new intelligent life would re-evolve if humans became extinct; and the probability that a newly evolved intelligent species could avoid its own extinction and transcend oblivion, assuming there is enough time to do so. To favour extinction of humans, the product of the second and third probabilities must be greater than the first probability.

Bruce E. Tonn, Futures sustainability, Futures, vol. 39, no. 9, 2007, pp. 1097–1116, p. 1100

Perhaps no one who has ever lived has done everything he or she ought. But surely no ethical theory should make it impossible for someone to do everything he or she ought.

Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter, Oughts, options, and actualism, The Philosophical Review, vol. 95, no. 2, 1986, pp. 233, p. 242