Some Quotes and Ideas I Like

2015-03-08

azim58 - Some Quotes and Ideas I Like

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
-Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species
-3-8-15

“The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words.  And that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.”
-Terrance McKenna; Note that I am highly skeptical and disregard much of Terrance McKenna's other works and ideas.
-2-11-15
-http://singularityhub.com/2015/02/08/as-science-and-technology-empower-us-to-rewrite-nature-what-story-will-emerge/

-thought from myself (I don't know the best way to word it or capture the idea. . .): People are going to die, relationships are going to end, and beautiful things and projects will be destroyed, but don't let this keep you from trying to move forward.
--11-08-2014d1255

-"People use the word god which I think is a metaphor . . which means unlimited in intelligence, love, creativity, beauty . . And so what happens in evolution?  Well, we see that entities get more intelligent, more creative, more beautiful. . becoming more Godlike.  So evolution is a spiritual process."  Ray Kurzweil.  found 10-11-2014d2242
--https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaKgmKhACIo

“The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed,” William Gibson 03-01-2014d1436 
 
Freeman Dyson 
a new generation of artists will be writing genomes with the fluency that Blake and Byron wrote verses.

John Schloendorn 
“These bodies certainly do require a lot of maintenance.” 
 
 
Alan Kay 
Technology is anything that was invented after you were born. 
-source 
--http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_on_how_technology_evolves.html 
 
 
Danny Hillis 
Technology is anything that doesn’t quite work yet. 
-source 
--http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_on_how_technology_evolves.html 
 
 
Richard Dawkins 
If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology. 
-source 
--The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design 
 
 
Kevin Kelly 
A finite game is to play to win.  The infinite game is to play to keep playing. 
-source 
--http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap-ZC21bk18 
 
 
Me 
Specific people, institutions, and governments will come and go, but ideas can last much longer and have a greater impact. 
-pre 11-08-2014d1425
-I kind of view this as a quote in support of an open source type of philosophy

"Multiple invention happens all the time in the arts as well as technology, but no one bothers to catalog similarities until a lot of money or fame is involved.  Because a lot of money swirls around Harry Potter we have discovered that, strange as it sounds, stories of boy wizards in magical schools with pet owls who enter their otherworlds through railway station platforms are inevitable at this point in Western culture." -Kevin Kelly in the book "What Technology Wants" 
 
 
"Clearly, no simple formula can emulate the most powerful phenomenon in the Universe: the complex and mysterious process of intelligence.  Actually, that's wrong.  All that is needed to  solve a surprisingly wide range of intelligent problems is exactly this: simple methods combined with heavy doses of computation (itself a simple process, as Alan Turing demonstrated in 1936 with his conception of the Turing Machine, an elegant model of computation) and examples of the problem.  In some cases, we don't even need the latter; just one well-defined statement of the problem will do." -Ray Kurzweil in "The Age of Spiritual Machines"

"Knowledge is going to become obsolete quickly." Ray Kurzweil (he means that you should learn how to learn because much of the knowledge of today will be obsolete soon)
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsFShIWlSkE

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Quotes previously stored at 
-https://docs.google.com/document/d/15X7iGncyjT7mSgcLMCsqmTM0RqbeMNZ2knoNXl2ZaqI/edit
-I don't think this link works anymore

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