“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about.”

— Joseph Campbell, “The Power of Myth”

“The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather what he does not say.”

— Kahlil Gibran

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

— Howard Zinn, “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress”

“The platonist metaphor assimilates mathematical enquiry to the investigations of the astronomer: mathematical structures, like galaxies, exist, independently of us, in a realm of reality which we do not inhabit but which those of us who have the skill are capable of observing and reporting on. The constructivist metaphor assimilates mathematical activity to that of the artificer fashioning objects in accordance with the creative power of the imagination.”

— Michael Dummett, “Truth and Other Enigmas”

“The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.”

— Thomas Berry

“Speak a new language
so that the world
will be a new world.”

— Rumi

“A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross sections cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one, things in motion, motion in things.”

— Ernest Fenollosa, “From The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” in “Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics”

“To define means to fix, and when you get down to it, real life isn’t fixed.”

— Alan Watts

Rolf Landauer insisted that bits are not abstract after all, or not merely abstract. He reminded his colleagues again and again that information cannot exist without some physical embodiment, whether a mark on a stone tablet, a hole in a punched card, or a subatomic particle with spin up or down. Information is “therefore” — pause for timpani and trumpets — “tied to the laws of physics and the parts available to us in our real physical universe.” (…)

Information still seems a sort of abstraction. Bits are binary choices, coin flips, yes/no, 1/0, on/off — insubstantial. How can they be as fundamental to physics as the traditional building blocks of matter and energy? Seth Lloyd puts it this way: “Earth, air, fire, and water in the end are all made of energy, but the different forms they take are determined by information. To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information.” (…)

“Otherwise put,” John Archibald Wheeler wrote, “every ‘it’—every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself, derives its function, its meaning, its very existence … [from] bits.” Nature — quantum theorists had learned — comes in irreducible discrete pieces, or quanta. Binary choices are quanta too. This is one way of fathoming the paradox of the observer: that the outcome of an experiment is affected, or even determined, when it is observed. The experiment is not only observing but also asking questions and making statements that must ultimately be expressed in discrete bits. “What we call reality,” Wheeler wrote, “arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions.” (…)

Why does nature appear quantized? Because information is quantized. The bit is the ultimate unsplittable particle.

— James Gleick, “The Unsplittable Bit” adapted from “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood”

“A specific analogy that Baudrillard uses is a fable derived from ‘On Exactitude in Science’ by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, a great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. In Baudrillard’s rendition, it is the map that people live in, the simulation of reality, and it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.”

— Wikipedia