Unification of Science and Spirit -- Copyright Ben Goertzel © 1996 |
This is a proof, as if any were necessary, that we are all really solipsists.
A: Do you really want to be the sort of person who always does does the rational thing?
Language is hungry; it always consumes part of your thought.
A: A poor thinker is one who is adept at destroying poor ideas.
A good thinker is one who is adept at destroying good ideas.
A great thinker is one who is adept at destroying great ideas.
B:Yes -- but the best thinker of all is the one who is destroyed by his ideas....
A: What's so great about being destroyed?
To be is not all that it is made out to be.
Not to be is not all that it is made out not to be.
B: I spend at least two days a week composing music, drawing pictures or writing poetry.
A: This keeps your mind limber?
Music does not exactly "represent" emotion. It is a purer form of emotion than emotion itself.
Music is a crucial educational tool: it teaches one how to feel.
A: What is it about a melody that makes it sound good?
B: What is it about the world that makes it appear solid and substantial?
B: Are your body and mind, and your work of art, not part of the physical world?
A: The paradox of love is that two can be together and separate at the same time.
B: No, it is rather that two can move closer together and move further apart at the same time.
The purpose of fiction, even so-called "realist" fiction, is never to reproduce reality.
This is as true of Balzac and Dickens as it is of Miller, Dostoevsky and Philip K. Dick.
If we could understand this at each moment, the death of our bodies would not be something unusual.
The realist mind could never survive without the regular dose of hyperreality provided by sleep.
In this way, our philosophies are tied to our planet, to the cycle of night and day.