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Making Sense QUOTES

Making Sense QUOTES

1 " Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. "

― Sam Harris , Making Sense

2 " What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations. "

― Sam Harris , Making Sense

3 " If your denial of death is sufficiently explicit and persuasive that you believe death isn't real, then what you deny isn't death but the significance of life. "

― Sam Harris , Making Sense

4 " Chalmers: It’s awfully hard to define consciousness. But I’d start by saying that it’s the subjective experience of the mind and the world. It’s basically what it feels like, from the first-person point of view, to be thinking and perceiving and judging. "

― Sam Harris , Making Sense

5 " There’s something it’s like for me to see the green leaves outside my window right now, so that’s a conscious state to me. But there may be some unconscious language-processing going on in my head that doesn’t feel like anything to me, or some motor processes in the cerebellum. Those might be states of me, but they’re not conscious states of me, because there’s nothing it’s like for me to undergo those states. "

― Sam Harris , Making Sense

6 " I take seriously the idea that we’re in a simulation. I have no idea whether or not it’s true, but if it is, if we are in a simulation, it’s not that nothing is real, not that there are no tables and chairs and trees. Rather, it’s that they exist in a different form from what we first thought. There’s a level of computation underneath what we take to be physical reality. "

― Sam Harris , Making Sense

7 " there is no divine purpose, only a plurality of human purposes. "

― Sam Harris , Making Sense

8 " Every person is a puppet who didn't pick his own strings and those strings reach back to the big bang. "

― Sam Harris , Making Sense

9 " The fascist says, "It's not what you think, or what you think you know, that is important. The only truth is whether or not you feel subjectively, spiritually, part of a larger national community __ and if you do, wonderful! And if you don't, then you're an enemy. "

― Sam Harris , Making Sense

10 " We're not really free unless we can put matters in our own words. And if we can't put them in our own words, we can't talk to other people, because if we speak the words of the internet or the TV news, other people will recognize that, and they are not really in our company, but somewhere else. "

― Sam Harris , Making Sense

11 " The sea squirt—a very simple marine creature—swims about during its juvenile phase looking for a place to settle, and once it settles and starts filter feeding, it digests its own brain, because it no longer has any need for perceptual or motor competence. This is often used as an unkind analogy for getting tenure in academia. "

― Sam Harris , Making Sense