216 Quotes About Cosmology

Scientists are people, and they are subject to the influences of their times. Theories explaining the world change diachronically or vary synchronically not only because of variation in the available data, but because of change and variation in the people producing the theories. Objectivity itself is culturally constituted.

[W]e can discover the world, but we decide upon the truth.

Although the past really happened—in the same way that the world is indeed out there—history is something we make.

[T]he details of a culture should not be reduced down to straightforward patterns or sequences because the details—the intricacies of human lives—are the point. Often we seek to understand people in their own right, and on their own terms rather than from an external perspective.

We all have a remarkable capacity to slot our observations into preconceived frameworks, and act accordingly. In other words, our intellectual models of contact generate history as surely as they recount it.

Culture is the multigenerational hard-drive of memory, change, and innovation. Culture transforms a record of the past into a prediction of the future; it transforms memory into tradition — into rules of how to proceed. And culture is profoundly social. It exists not just in one mind, but binds together mobs of minds in a common enterprise.

We need not assume our universe is in essence “computational,” “alive,” or even “hierarchically dissipative,” only that these computational, organic, and thermodynamic analogies may serve to advance our understanding of processes far more complex than our models.

But exaltation of humanity in no way justifies unchecked devotion at the expense of others who inhabit our world and perhaps worlds beyond.

[T]hink about culture as the collective manifestation of value—where value is that which is valuable to “sufficiently complex” agents, from which meaning, purpose, ethics, and aesthetics can be derived.