Philosophy

"What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be — until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically? I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas."

"It strikes me that self, not just my self, but all self, the phenomenon of self, is perhaps one field, one consciousness – perhaps there is only one ‘I’, perhaps our brains, our selves, our entire identity is little more than a label on a waveband. We are only us when we are here. At this particular moment in space and time, this particular locus, the overall awareness of the entire continuum happens to believe it is Alan Moore. Over there – [he points to another table in the pizza restaurant] – it happens to believe it is something else. I get the sense that if you can pull back from this particular locus, this web-site if you like, then you could be the whole net. All of us could be. That there is only one awareness here, that is trying out different patterns. We are going to have to come to some resolution about a lot of things in the next twenty years time, our notions of time, space, identity."

"The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive."

"Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons."

"Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place."

"Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very week identity."

"All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody."

"Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction."

"Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been … destroyed by sudden environmental change."

"I try to find the core values that are so fundamental that they transcend ethnic identity. That doesn't mean I run from it. I embrace African-American culture and I love it and embrace it, but it is a part of a human identity. So I'm always trying to make a larger human statement."

"The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening."

"I don't need to worry about identity theft because no one wants to be me."

"The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God's identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it's the truth."

"I don't know how tall I am or how much I weigh. Because I don't want anybody to know my identity. I'm like a superhero. Call me Basketball Man."

"My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify."

"Doesn't the world see the suffering of millions of Palestinians who have been living in exile around the world or in refugee camps for the past 60 years? No state, no home, no identity, no right to work. Doesn't the world see this injustice?"

"A sense of identity is the gift of love, and only love can give it."

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."

"This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature."

"When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases."

"We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us."

"Positioning one's own identity in relation to the existence of the other is sickness. If you need an enemy to keep your identity alive, your identity is sick. Original: Kendi kimliğini ötekinin varlığına göre konumlandırmak hastalıktır. Kimliğini yaşatmak için sana bir düşman gerekiyorsa, senin kimliğin hastalıklıdır."

"Too many women throw themselves into romance because they're afraid of being single, then start making compromises and losing their identity. I won't do that."

"If you’ve ever sat in a room with twins, immediately you’re forced to deal with this confusion. You’re afraid to call them by name because you’re afraid you’re going to get it wrong. At first being a twin is a source of power, you can switch, you can fool people—but then it becomes a vulnerability because people confuse you when you don’t want them to. The famous story of the twins who were both spanked when either one of them did something wrong because the parents wanted to make sure they got the right twin. So that would immediately make each twin totally responsible for the other one’s actions and therefore would make you want to control the other twin’s actions. It gets quite twisted and the confusion of identities becomes quite intense."

"I don't blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout. I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they'll realize there's more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously."

"There is nothing so certain to lead to inequality as identity."

"When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity."

"If you look for an identity you find inequality. If you look for similarities you separate one truth from another."

"Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."

"Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity."

"Unlike a drop of water which loses its identity when it joins the ocean, man does not lose his being in the society in which he lives. Man's life is independent. He is born not for the development of the society alone, but for the development of his self."

"We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."

"Wisdom is dead. Long live information."

"If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess."

"... we simply try to give you all of the information about our businesses, in a large general way, that Charlie and I would want if our positions were reversed. ... The facts are out about what we do."

"Information is not a substance or concrete entity but rather a relationship between sets or ensembles of structured variety."

"Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use."

"I... refer to the... Waynflete Lectures given by... E. D. Adrian, on The Physical Background of Perception because the results of physiological investigations seem... in perfect agreement with my suggestion about the meaning of reality in physics. The messages which the brain receives have not the least similarity with the stimuli. They consist in pulses of given intensities and frequencies, characteristic for the transmitting nerve-fiber, which ends in a definite place in the cortex. All the brain 'learns' (I use... the objectionable language of the 'disquieting figure of a little hobgoblin sitting... aloft in the ') is a distribution or a 'map' of pulses. From this information it produces the image of the world by a process which can metaphorically be called a consummate place of combinatorial mathematics: it sorts out of the maze of indifferent and varying signals invariant shapes and relations which form the world of ordinary experience."

"In 2007, for the first time ever, more information was generated in one year than had been produced in the entire previous five thousand years - the period since the invention of writing."

"Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise."

"Information exists. It does not need to be perceived to exist. It does not need to be understood to exist. It requires no intelligence to interpret it. It does not have to have meaning to exist. It exists."

"It used to be said that information is power. As Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the board of the New York Times Co., rightly says, "Information is now ubiquitous. Power is understanding.""

"You don’t hide information by destroying it. You hide it by swamping it with bad information."

"Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune."

"Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process or fail in their purpose. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man's inner life, even as they belong to his life in society."

"Data, seeming facts, apparent asso­ciations-these are not certain knowledge of something. They may be puzzles that can one day be explained; they may be trivia that need not be explained at all."

"There's no going back, and there's no hiding the information. So let everyone have it."

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep."

"You've seen how information holds system together and how delayed, biased, scattered, or missing information can make feedback loops malfunction. Decision-makers can respond to information they don't have, can't respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, and can't respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information. [...] Information is power."

"As I understand the theory of period information doubling, this states that if we take one period of human information as being the time between the invention of the first hand axe, say around 50,000 BC and 1 AD, then this is one period of human information and we can measure it by how many human inventions we came up during that time. Then we see how long it takes for us to have twice as many inventions. This means that human information has doubled. As it turns out, after the first 50,000-year period, the second period is about 1500 years, say around the time of the Renaissance. By then we have twice as much information. To double again, human information took a couple of hundred years. The period speeds up—between 1960 and 1970, human information doubled. As I understand it, at the last count human information was doubling around every 18 months. Further to this, there is a point sometime around 2015 where human information is doubling every thousandth of a second. This means that in each thousandth of a second we will have accumulated more information than we have in the entire previous history of the world. At this point I believe that all bets are off. I cannot imagine the kind of culture that might exist after such a flashpoint of knowledge. I believe that our culture would probably move into a completely different state, would move past the boiling point, from a fluid culture to a culture of steam."