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O Quotes

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All O Quotes

“Our borders are much too porous...We want to keep them open, but we also have to be much more careful. ...Right now, if you get on an airplane [to the U.S.] and claim asylum...when you arrive at Kennedy Airport in New York, they will say to you, 'OK, we'll give you a hearing on whether you deserve asylum. Show up in a year.' And two-thirds of the people never show up.”

“Our botanist plucked the flowers and named them after himself. And my new husband swept aside all the offerings to the dead and set up his telescope on the altar, because the offering was clear of trees and he wanted the best vantage into the skies. When one of the islanders protested, and tried to push George away, Captain Lateshaw had the man flogged. Because order had to be maintained”

“Our brain comes hard-wired with an urge to play, one that hurls us into sociability. A child's play both demands and creates its own safe space, one in which she can confront threats, fears, and dangers, but always come through whole. Play offers a child a natural way to manage feared separations or abandonment, rendering them instead opportunities for mastery and self-discovery.”

“Our brain is therefore not simply passively subjected to sensory inputs. From the get-go, it already possesses a set of abstract hypotheses, an accumulated wisdom that emerged through the sift of Darwinian evolution and which it now projects onto the outside world. Not all scientists agree with this idea, but I consider it a central point: the naive empiricist philosophy underlying many of today's artificial neural networks is wrong. It is simply not true that we are born with completely disorganized circuits devoid of any knowledge, which later receive the imprint of their environment. Learning, in man and machine, always starts from a set of a priori hypotheses, which are projected onto the incoming data, and from which the system selects those that are best suited to the current environment. As Jean-Pierre Changeux stated in his best-selling book Neuronal Man (1985), “To learn is to eliminate.”

“Our brains adjust to both harmony and disagreement. We unconsciously try to please others, we also want to agree with others. Why? Humans value social conformity so much that they'll change their own responses - even their perceptions - to align with the group, even when the group is blatantly wrong. We are wired to conform. Your brain would rather not deal with conflict and debate. It would much prefer to lounge in the comfort of like-mindedness. The instinct for agreement has a huge impact in our lives. It is one of the reasons why in a culture of complaint, we join the fray.”

“Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.”

“Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections - that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It's hard to imagine this, so let's visualise each connection as a disc that's 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion discs on top of each other and they will reach the sun (which is ninety-three million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.”

“Our brains do not generate consciousness since our minds are embedded into the larger consciousness system. We humans are deep down information technology running on genetic, neural and societal codes. Self-transcendence from a bio-human or cyberhuman into a higher-dimensional info-being might be closer than you think.”