"There is no drawing the line between physics and metaphysics. If you examine every day facts at all closely, you are a physicist; but if you press your physics at all home, you become a metaphysician; if you press your metaphysics at all home, you are in a fog." (Samuel Butler)
"There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time." (Samuel Butler, "Erewhon: Or, Over the Range", 1872)
"A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words." (Samuel Butler, "The Note-Books of Samuel Butler", 1912)
"The pursuit of truth is chimerical. […] There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas." (Samuel Butler, "Notebooks", 1912)
"As, no matter what cunning system of checks we devise, we must in the end trust someone whom we do not check, but to whom we give unreserved confidence, so there is a point at which the understanding and mental processes must be taken as understood without further question or definition in words. And I should say that this point should be fixed pretty early in the discussion." (Samuel Butler, "The Note-Books of Samuel Butler", 1917)
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