Science holds our answer; knowledge—real knowledge, verifiable knowled — Robert J. Sawyer

"“There are two opposing forces—the high mind and the low—but they reside in our brains, not various parts of our bodies. The high mind contains the conscious, the understood, the learned—that of which we are aware. The low mind consists of instincts and base impulses, of drives; it’s the province of the subconscious. The struggle between high and low mind produces the personality.” “But surely the high mind is who we really are,” said Afsan. “No. The high mind may represent who we want to be, or who the church says we should be, but we are just as much our low minds as we are our high; the low mind shapes our behavior, too.”"

"It embodies, perhaps more clearly than anything else Ive written, the central theme of all my work: namely, that clearheaded, unflinching, rational thinking is the only effective way to deal with reality."

"“I’ve never heard you talk like this before.” “We all change with the passing of the days.”"

"I do remember her favorite expression: the Lord works in mysterious ways. Perhaps so. But I found it hard to believe he would work in shoddy, haphazard ones."

"Must God be defined in a way that places him or her beyond the scope of science? I’d always believed that there was nothing beyond the scope of science. And I still believe that. Where do you draw the line? Right here. For me, the answer was right here. How do you define God? Like this. A God I could understand, at least potentially, was infinitely more interesting and relevant than one that defied comprehension."

"“But you get along with humans now, which is something my people are having trouble managing. How do you do it?” Longbottle barked, “Accept their weaknesses, welcome their strengths.” Jag was silent."

"I appeal to all pupils, students and young people, asking you to focus on the horizons that are opening up for you, and which you could only dream of a year ago. Our future will depend on your desire for education and moral values as well as on your entrepreneurial spirit."

"We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems."

"We are shocked when we see educators, timid before criticism and confused about first principles, betray their trust. And we wonder what can be that philosophy of education which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool."

"An [hypertext] encyclopaedia will be an overall attempt by the knowledgeable, the learned societies or anyone else, to represent the state-of-the-art in their field. An encyclopaedia will be a living document, as up to date as it can be, instantly accessible at any time. It will contain carefully authored explanations and summaries of the subject, as well as computer-generated indexes of literature. A reference to a paper from the encyclopaedia conveys authority and acceptance by academic society. A measure of a paper’s standing may be conveyed by the number of links it is away from an encyclopaedia."

"A sample of the modern debate, which neatly summarizes the anti-reductionist position is provided by Grene (1974). She points out that in principle a one-level ontology—the belief, for example, that with increasing knowledge all science will become an account of the world in the language of, say, atomic events—contradicts itself. This is so because such a belief, to be meaningful, requires an ontology which admits both atomic events and cognition. Here at once a second level is smuggled in! It is logically possible... that there might be no levels in between those of atomic events and cognition (that in essence is Descartess position) but the sciences of chemistry and biology consist of some well-tested conjectures that there are such intermediate levels as are represented by molecules, cells, organelles, organs, and organisms."

"All competent thinkers agree with Bacon that there can be no real knowledge except that which rests upon observed facts. This fundamental maxim is evidently indisputable if it is applied, as it ought to be, to the mature state of our intelligence. But, if we consider the origin of our knowledge, it is no less certain that the primitive human mind could not, and indeed ought not to, have thought in that way. For if, on the one hand, every Positive theory must necessarily be founded upon observations, it is, on the other hand, no less true that, in order to observe, our mind has need of some theory or other. If in contemplating phenomena we did not immediately connect them with principles, not only would it be impossible for us to combine these isolated observations, and therefore to derive profit from them, but we should even be entirely incapable of remembering facts, which would for the most remain unnoted by us. Thus there were two difficulties be overcome: the human mind had to observe in order to form real theories, and yet had to form theories of some sort before it could apply itself to a connected series of observations. The primitive human mind, therefore, found itself involved in a vicious circle, from which it would never have had any means of escaping, if a natural way of the difficulty had not fortunately found by the spontaneous development of Theological conceptions. ...chimerical hopes ..exaggerated ideas of mans importance in the universe to which the Theological Philosophy ...at the commencement, ...afforded an indispensable stimulus without the aid which we cannot, indeed, conceive how the primitive human mind would have been induced to undertake any arduous labours."