History is a pack of lies about events that never happened, told by people who weren't there
George Santayana
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened, told by people who weren't there
"The problem with quotes on the Internet is that you can never quite be sure of their origin."
- Abraham Lincoln
The concept of time is one of the great historical killers of happiness. Early in the Palaeolithic era, time did not exist beyond one's interaction with the natural world. There were no hints of the perpetual time crunch in which over-stressed moderns find themselves...As the concept of time evolved and came to be measured more precisely, the past and future began to dilute the immediacy of experiences, and to block access to our emotions.
Q: Could one of your personalities, say, buy a car, or have a friend or a lover the others disliked?
A: Sure. Sometimes I get strange messages on my answering machine from people I don’t know. I have CDs that I hate. I have no idea how I got them. Sure.
Q: What if one of your personalities did something really bad – committed a crime, perhaps – who is responsible in that case?
A: I am.
Q: Wait a minute. I thought you didn’t have a sense of I.
A: Doesn’t matter. I am.
“Bear in mind, also, that – for anyone – perhaps nothing defines unified personhood so solidly as the courage of strong commitment to personal responsibility. Garrett could so easily have claimed to be non compos mentis, with gigantic believability and reams of medical records to back him up. But he never made that claim. Instead, […], he was dedicated to the defining feature of responsibility for his actions, regardless of which ego state had performed them. And for that reason, I had already begun to think of him as someone who might, quite possibly, recover.”
Light, in the absence of eyes, illuminates nothing. Visible forms are not inherent in the world, but are granted by the act of seeing. Though the world and events do exist independent of mind, they obtain of no meaning in themselves: none that the mind is not guilty of imposing on them.
Character Disturbance page 140 said:Remember, you are NOT ENTITLED to anything. Your life is an unearned gift. Strive to be truly grateful for the many gifts you've received. Regard life and the miracle of creation with appropriate awe and appreciation. Gratitude will enable you to develop a sense of obligation to value, preserve, and to promote life and to respect all aspects of creation. Knowing how inherently indebted you really are will keep you from feeling entitled.
You are neither an insignificant speck nor are you so precious or essential to the universe that it simply cannot do without you. Know where you fit in the grand scheme of things and keep a balanced perspective on your sense of worth. Thinking too much of yourself is as dangerous as thinking too little of yourself.
Data and Lal ENTER.
LAL
I watch them and I can do the
things they do... but I'll never
feel the emotions. I'll never
know love.
DATA
That is a limitation we must
learn to accept, Lal.
LAL
Then why do you still try to
emulate humans? What purpose
does it serve except to remind
you that you are incomplete?
DATA
I have asked myself that many
times as I have struggled to be
more human, Lal. Until I finally
realized that it is the struggle
itself that is most important.
We must strive to be better than
we are. It does not matter that
we will never reach our ultimate
goal. The effort yields its own
rewards.
That quote touches upon why I liked that character so much when I used to watch TNG. To me, Data represents the tendency toward the mechanical in all of us and at the same time the genuine drive to do better.Data said:This touched me deeply. Recently I watched Star Trek, The Next Generation, where Data and his self-constructed daughter-android, Lal, have the following conversation:
Richard Dolan said:Hope and fear: Fear is an enemy. We know this because when we are afraid, we react irrationally to things, we don’t think through. Hope is an enemy, too, though. That sounds kind of wrong, doesn’t it? Everyone likes to have hope: Don’t give up hope. But, here’s the problem with hope: Hope also deludes.
We need to have a cold eye.