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Mechanism Quotes

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Mechanism Quotes

“The process of dissociation is an elegant mechanism built into the human psychological system as a form of escape from (sometimes literally) going crazy. The problem with checking out so thoroughly is that it can leave us feeling dead inside, with little or no ability to feel our feelings in our bodies. The process of repair demands a re-association with the body, a commitment to dive into the body and feel today what we couldn’t feel yesterday because it was too dangerous.”

PsychologyTraumaDefenseMechanismDissociationRepair
Book:Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence
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“I think that the event which, more than anything else, led me to the search for ways of making more powerful radio telescopes, was the recognition, in 1952, that the intense source in the constellation of Cygnus was a distant galaxy—1000 million light years away. This discovery showed that some galaxies were capable of producing radio emission about a million times more intense than that from our own Galaxy or the Andromeda nebula, and the mechanisms responsible were quite unknown. ... [T]he possibilities were so exciting even in 1952 that my colleagues and I set about the task of designing instruments capable of extending the observations to weaker and weaker sources, and of exploring their internal structure.”

ScienceUniverseSpacePowerPossibilitySourceStructureAstronomyObservationIntensityMechanismTelescopeMilky WayNobel LaureateLight YearsGalaxiesAndromedaAndromeda GalaxyRadio AstronomyRadio Telescope
Author:Martin Ryle
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“We have come to understand the phenomena of life only as an assemblage of the lifeless. We take the mechanistic abstractions of our technical calculation to be ultimately concrete and "fundamentally real," while our most intimate experiences are labelled "mere appearance" and something having reality only within the closet of the isolated mind. Suppose however we were to invert this whole scheme, reverse the order in which it assigns abstract and concrete. What is central to our experience, then, need not be peripheral to nature. This sunset now, for example, caught within the network of bare winter branches, seems like a moment of benediction in which the whole of nature collaborates. Why should not these colours and these charging banners of light be as much a part of the universe as the atoms and molecules that make them up? If they were only "in my mind," then I and my mind would no longer be a part of nature. Why should the pulse of life toward beauty and value not be a part of things? Following this path, we do not vainly seek to assemble the living out of configurations of dead stuff, but we descend downwards from more complex to simpler grades of the organic. From humans to trees to rocks; from "higher grade" to "lower grade" organisms. In the universe of energy, any individual thing is a pattern of activity within the flux, and thereby an organism at some level.”

ExperienceAbstractPhenomenonMechanismConcreteReductionismHolismVitalism
Book:The illusion of technique: a search for meaning in a technological civilization
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“It isn't the sort of argument Pointsman relishes either. But he glances sharply at this young anarchist in his red scarf. "Pavlov believed that the ideal, the end we all struggle toward in science, is the true mechanical explanation. He was realistic enough not to expect it in his lifetime. Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better and better approximations. His faith ultimately lay in a pure physiological basis for the life of the psyche. No effect without cause, and a clear train of linkages. "It's not my forte, of course," Mexico honestly wishing not to offend the man, but really, "but there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less . . . sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle." "No - not 'strike off.' Regress. You're 30 years old, man. There are no 'other angles.' There is only forward - into it – or backward.”

ScienceExplanationMechanismPhilosophy Of ScienceBehaviorism
Book:Gravity’s Rainbow
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“...all around George, approaching him, crossing his path from every direction, is the male and female raw material which is fed daily into this factory, along the conveyor-belts of the freeways, to be processed, packaged and placed on the market... What do they think they are up to? Well, there is the official answer; preparing themselves for life which means a job and security in which to raise children to prepare themselves for life which means a job and security in which... Here, in their midst, George feels a sort of vertigo. Oh God, what will become of them all? What chance have they? Ought I yell out to them, right now, here, that it's hopeless? But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself almost, he is a representative of hope. And the hope is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real.”

LifePurposeMechanism
Book:A single man
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“There is the potential for a particle of matter to be located where we expect it to be or to be located anywhere in the physical world. So it is with our lives – our very next moment can occur along the most probable path or it can occur on a path entirely discontinuous with the expectations that others have for us, but more likely in line with the expectations that we have for ourselves.”

GodSuccessFaithTheoryEvolutionMathematicsMechanismMetaphysicsQuantum PhysicsAchieve Your DreamsMany WorldsMany Worlds Interpretation
Book:Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams
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“The ability of an object to constitute itself as a subject is thus defined, in the first instance, by the objective context provided by the genus; that is, the capacity or incapacity of an object to constitute itself as an individual subject depends first and foremost on the kind of thing the object is. For mechanical, chemical, and externally purposive objects, the power of the genus is determined essentially as violence insofar as these objects cannot constitute themselves as subjects through a predicate due to their very nature as defined by their genus. For example, a rock, qua rock, can be determined through a predicate externally - by means of external impact from other objects and forces (it can be crushed or cracked into pieces) or by means of human definition and conceptualization (this rock is igneous and that one is sedimentary) - but is cannot determine itself through a predicate and constitute itself as a subject by means of its own activity. The power of the objet to constitute itself as a subject is necessarily defined in relation to its essential Gattung-predicate, a predicate that manifests the power of violence insofar as the object is unable to constitute itself as a subject by means of this very same predicate. The third characteristic, finally, is that power as violence directs itself against individuality. In specifying that it is only in the presence of the freedom of self-consciousness that the power of the genus can be determined as fate, Hegel writes the following: 'Only self-consciousness has fate in the strict sense, because it is free, and therefore in the individuality of its 'I' it absolutely exists in and for itself and can oppose itself to its objective universality and alienate itself from it'. Individuality is thus defined as an existence in and for itself that can stand opposed to and be in contradiction with its objective universality or genus, while continuing to manifest the genus's power as identical with its own self-relation. Without the ability to oppose its genus, the ability to be self-alienated with respect to its genus, the object is not, strictly speaking, an individual (it remains a mere particular, a token of its type entirely interchangeable with other tokens of the same type). Individuality is therefore not only the power of the object to constitute itself as a subject through its predicate, but moreover, this power of self-constitution is essentially also the power to oppose, contradict, and transform the genus by means of the genus's own power as manifest in the determinateness of an individual.”

ThinkingViolenceMechanismStrivingPurposivenessChemismExternal Purposiveness
Book:Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic
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“Indeed, it is this threefold character of man—the fact that through his spiritual intellect, which is so much more than merely rational, he has an affinity with the divine, while with his body he is linked to the material world—that gives him such a key position and role in the universe. He stands between God and the material world, between heaven and earth. In the old formula, he is the microcosm.' In fact, all things in creation have their meeting-place in man, and man is potentially all things. Properly seen, nothing is external to him. This is in contradistinction to the modern scientific view of things, which presupposes precisely that man does regard the world of nature as an object external to himself. It presupposes a loss of that consciousness in which nature is seen as part of his own subjectivity, as the living garment of his own inner being. Consequently man has also lost the sense of his role in relationship to the rest of creation. Displacing himself from nature, depersonalizing and objectifying it, he has destroyed the harmony and reciprocity that should exist between them.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“The mechanistic character of modern science is marked by a desire to dominate, to master and possess and to exploit nature, not to transform it, or to hallow it. It presumes that the earth belongs to man, not man to the earth. In this it simply reflects the self-assertion of its agent, the disinherited reason which, having completed its revolt against what surpasses it, now seeks to impose its laws over the rest of life. Man’s loss of his sense of harmony and reciprocity with nature—his destruction of the nuptial bonds between them—is itself the consequence of his loss of his sense of his status and role as the link between heaven and earth, the channel through which all commerce between them passes.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“God’s enhumanization has not only ‘taken manhood into God’; it has also taken the whole created world into God, has resurrected it and transfigured it in its very depths. It is only man’s continuing alienation from the ground of his being that prevents him from realizing this, that throws a veil of opacity between God and man, God and the world, an keeps them in a state of false division and disunity. Correspondingly, it is through overcoming this alienation, and through remaking himself in the image and likeness of the divine that is at the heart of his own subjective life and that confers on him his unique quality as a person, that he shares in the priesthood of Christ and in that sacrament of love and beauty in which all things, released from their bondage, live, move and have their being. Outside this relationship, apart from this sacrament, man has no real place in the world, or the world in him. He is but a tormented shadow of himself, and his world a forsaken wilderness, and on both he is compelled to seek ever further revenge for that crime against his own nature which he refuses to acknowledge, still more to expiate.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“This is why the gradual erosion of the significance of the Incarnation over the last centuries (to the point to which the whole idea of it appears to some to be virtually superfluous where Christian doctrine is concerned) has meant the erosion of the true significance of man as artist. Man has lost his sense of his role as mediator between God and the world; he has lost his sense that the forms of his art should mirror the divine and that unless his work possesses this sacramental quality it will be as vacuous and ugly as most of the articles which now surround our daily lives, public and private. A social order which deprives man and his practices of their sacramental quality is already dead, no matter what frenetic activity it may appear to manifest.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“He has more or less eliminated the idea of God-manhood from his mind. Having rejected the understanding that his life and activity are significant only in so far as they incarnate, reflect and radiate that transcendent spiritual reality which is the ground and centre of his own being, he is condemned to believe that he is the autocratic and omnipotent ruler of his own affairs and of the world about him, which it is his right and duty to subdue, organize, investigate and exploit to serve his profane mental curiosity or his acquisitive material appetites. The deification of man as a fallen mortal entity has led, as we are only too well aware, to the most extreme forms of cruelty and rapacity, forms which deny the unique and absolute value of the human person and of every other created reality. The assertion that man is merely human has resulted in a dehumanization possibly without parallel in the history of the world.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Author:Philip Sherrard
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“One has to judge things by their fruits. And one of the fruits of modern science, clear for all to see, and implicit in the philosophy on which it is based, is the dehumanization both of man and of the society that he has built in its name.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“The world-picture, with man in it, is flattened and neutralized, stripped of all sacred or spiritual qualities, of all hierarchical differentiation, and spread out before the human observer like a blank chart on which nothing can be registered except what is capable of being measured. For Newton, the celestial spheres are a machine, for Descartes, animals are machines, for Hobbes, society is a machine, for La Mettrie, the human body is a machine, eventually for Pavlov and his successors human behaviour is like that of a machine. There is nothing that is not reduced either to phenomenon (fact) or to mathematical hypothesis (or, in less polite language, fiction). The whole physical world is regarded as no more than so much inanimate dead matter whose chemical changes are mechanical processes based upon the so-called law of the conservation of mass. Everything, including the mind of man," is aligned on the model of a machine constructed out of dissections, analyses and calculations.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“Already by the first half of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, scientists—and especial] scientists who would apply their knowledge—were beginning to move into the centre of the social and economic scene. Aided and abetted by hard-headed industrialists and bankers possessed by a single-minded devotion to making money no matter what devastation they produced, scientists began to turn their expertise to the practical exploitation of the world’s natural resources. It must be remembered, too, that they rode on the crest of the new ‘spirit of the age’. There was a feeling of optimism in the air, a sense of moving forward into the future under the aegis of a new divinity, the Reason, that was now extending its empire over the whole western consciousness. Man was naturally good. The world was a good place to live in. It could be a much better place if only its natural resources and man’s ability to put them to his use could be exploited more fully and efficiently.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“If efficient technical means for achieving something exist or can be produced, then these means must be put into action irrespective of what this thing is or of what the cost may be in human terms. Even those who were at first the victims of these processes—the industrial proletariat—have been seduced by their glamour and regard them as the magical talisman that will bring them all they need in life. As for the elite of our technocracy—those who manipulate its inexhaustible gadgetry of machines, devices, techniques, the computers and cybernated systems, the simulation and gaming processes, the market and motivational research, the immense codifications necessary to sustain and enlarge their empire of sterilized artificiality—their prestige is virtually unassailable because on them the whole edifice depends for its survival and prosperity. Moreover, if they are readers of Teilhard de Chardin, they can add ideological grist to their pragmatic mill, for he will have taught them that it is through the consolidation of the ‘noosphere’, that level of existence permanently dominated by the mind of man and its planning, that our species will execute its God-given task and fulfill its destiny.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“Moreover, it is not only our emotional world that is deadened. The world of our creative imagination and intelligence is also impoverished. The most average characterless type of mind is quite sufficient to master and apply the various skills, scientific and other, needed to run our society.At the same time, the objects which we now make or manufacture require little or no imaginative effort on our part; they are all the result of rational planning and design, of technical skill and efficiency, and we produce them—are forced to produce them—with the least possible personal struggle or commitment, entering into and becoming through producing them part of their objective, impersonal and pitiless nature. For these products—machines, commodities, organizations, programmes—are themselves totally devoid of any Imaginative quality: they mirror nothing which is not material, they are symbols of nothing, they are entirely consumed by their own lifeless and inorganic indifference; and man who must spend his days among them is reduced to a similar state. Indeed, what goes by the name of work for the vast majority of the members of our society rots the very soul and body. It is work which takes no account whatsoever of the personal qualities of the individuals engaged in it; it has no direct connection with what a particular person really is or with that by virtue which he is himself and not someone else; it is purely external to him and he can exchange it—if there is anything available—for an alternative which is equally impersonal and exterior. In relation to our work, the vast majority of us in our society are equivalent to mere ‘units’, or objects or commodities, and are condemned for all our wokring lives to purely mechanical activites in which nothing properly human exists and whose performance is not in any way consistent with our inner and personal aptitudes and identities.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“The result has been that theologians have largely failed to make any radical or effective critique of scientific epistemology, to elucidate the consequences of making the reason the supreme and sole instrument of knowledge, and to explain why this has meant a progressive falsification of our understanding both of ourselves and of the world about us. In view of this failure it is not surprising that so many students of our universities end up with no better ideology than some form of Marxist-Leninism, itself a translation into political terms of some of the most banal aspects of nineteenth century bourgeois scientific theory. When this same hotch-potch of rationalist-materialist constructs is taken over by—or, rather, takes possession of—the masses, then society is turned into a prison-camp in which everything that gives human life its value and dignity is systematically attacked and lacerated.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“...we demean ourselves and our potentialities When we take an unrelievedly pessimistic view of our fate. Yet equally we demean ourselves when we nourish ourselves on illusions. The social and cultural order that we have built and are continuing to build about us—our present—is one predominantly determined by the categories of a false philosophy and its practical application; and the consequence of our acquiescence on such a mass scale to what amounts to a lie about ourselves and the true nature of the physical world cannot but be an increasing divorce between this order and that of the human and natural norm. In fact, this divorce has now become so great that it is virtually impossible for the one to understand the other. We have all but lost the capacity to measure how far we have in fact fallen below the level of the human and natural norm.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“Modern science, then, ignoring the sacred aspect of nature as a condition of its own genesis and development, tries to fill the vacuum it has created by producing mathematical schemes whose only function is to help us to manipulate and ‘dominate’ matter on its own plane, which is that of quantity alone. The physical world, regarded as so much dead stuff, becomes the scene of man’s uncurbed exploitation for purely practical, utilitarian or acquisitive ends. It is treated as a de-incarnate world of phenomena that are without interest except in so far as they subserve statistics or fill test-tubes in order to satisfy the curiosity of the scientific mind, or are materially useful to man considered as a two-legged animal with no destiny beyond his earthly existence.”

PhilosophyChristianityMechanism
Book:The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science
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“The photographs of space taken by our astronauts have been published all over the place. But the eye is a much more dynamic mechanism than any camera or pictures. It's a more exciting view in person than looking at the photographs. Of course, I personally am sick and tired of hearing people talk like that: I want to see it myself!”

PeopleWantPersonsHas BeensEyeCoursesSpaceViewsTakenSickExcitingCamerasTiredPhotographHearingMechanismAstronaut
Author:Burt Rutan
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“The challenge of abating one with a genuine ego problem is to not try to put him down. Any and all antagonization, in his mind, is merely compensated for by his own descriptions: his feelings of persecution by the envious and his ideals of worth. Arguably, the genuine ego is more of a circumstantial defense mechanism rather than a steady arrogance in need of starvation.”

NeedsTryingMindFeelingsProblemChallengesBrainEgoIdealsDefenseGenuineArroganceDescriptionSteadyMechanismPersecutionStarvationEnviousDefense MechanismsEgo Problem
Book:Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
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“I’m instantly mortified by my fat, uncontrollable mouth, but that’s when it occurs to me that my humor is a self-defense mechanism. Even though I may come off like a stark raving asshat, being funny is the most important tool I have to stay sane. The ability to say what I think is the key to allowing me to feel in control.”

ThinkingFeelsMayImportantSelfAbilityKeysMouthsToolsDefenseFatsAllowingMechanismSaneSelf DefenseStarksBeing FunnyUncontrollableDefense Mechanisms
Author:Jen Lancaster
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“When all of our idols are taken away, all our securities and defense mechanisms, we find out who we really are. We’re so little, so poor, so emptyand a shock to ourselves. But the Biblical God takes away our shame, and we are eventually able to present ourselves in an honest and humble form. Then we find out who we really are and who God is for usand it is more than enough. That is how an enslaved people became God’s people, Israel.”

PeopleLittlesEnoughAbleFormPoorTakenHonestSecurityShameIsraelHumbleDefenseShockIdolsMechanismBiblicalWho God IsDefense Mechanisms
Author:Aaron Lines
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“The Analytical Engine might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine… Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

ShouldMightActionFoundSoundNumbersPiecesObjectsExpressionDegreesRelationHarmonyFundamentalsMusicalInstanceOperationsAbstractComplexityMutualEnginesMechanismCompositionAdaptationSusceptibleSupposingMutual FundMusical Composition
Author:Ada Lovelace
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“If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child's natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn't possibly do as good a job as is currently being done-I simply wouldn't have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.”

IfsKindChildrenIdeasSoulDoneJobsPurposeImaginationNaturalDesignAnd LoveMathematicsCuriosityPatternsCome UpContemporaryCrushDestroyingMechanismBeing DoneNatural Curiosity
Author:Paul Lockhart
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“The main Business of Natural Philosophy is to argue from Phænomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects till we come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the Mechanism of the World, but chiefly to resolve these, and to such like Questions.”

WorldFirstsPhilosophyScienceCausesNaturalEffectsArguingResolveMechanismHypothesisNatural PhilosophyFeigning
Book:Isaaci Newtoni Opera quae exstant omnia
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“The integrative tendencies of the individual operate through the mechanisms of empathy, sympathy, projection, introjection, identification, worship- all of which make him feel that he is a part of some larger entity which transcends the boundaries of the individual self. This psychological urge to belong, to participate, to commune is as primary and real as its opposite. The all-important question is the nature of that higher entity of which the individual feels himself a part.”

FeelsImportantRealSelfIndividualSocietyHigherWorshipEmpathyOppositesBoundariesTendenciesPsychologicalPrimariesUrgesMechanismEntityProjectionIdentificationImportant QuestionsCommunes
Author:Arthur Koestler
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