Quotes about thinking

He’s hunted enough guys to know that their own heads can be their worst enemies. They start seeing things that aren’t there, then, worse, not seeing things that are. They worry and worry, and chew on their own insides, until, when you do track them down, they’re almost grateful. By this time, they’ve been killed so many times in their minds that the real thing is a relief.

Here's a heresy: "How do you know that?" is a powerful question for helping people think, but it's not the best question. The best question is, "How could that belief be wrong?"

Honestly, sometimes you'd rather be a dog. A mutt doesn't torture itself with thinking.

Whether Hal could actually think was a question which had been settled by the British mathematician Alan Turing back in the 1940s. Turing had pointed out that, if one could carry out a prolonged conversation with a machine — whether by typewriter or microphone was immaterial — without being able to distinguish between its replies and those that a man might give, then the machine was thinking, by any sensible definition of the word. Hal could pass the Turing test with ease.

So he always kept his mouth shut. He kept his ears open and listened closely to whatever anyone else had to say, aiming to learn something from everything he heard. This habit eventually became a useful tool. Through this, he discovered a number of important realities, including this one: most people in the world don’t really use their brains to think. And people who don’t think are the ones who don’t listen to others.

“Fukada was supposedly looking for a utopia in the Takashima system,” the Professor said with a frown. “But utopias don’t exist, of course, anywhere in any world. Like alchemy or perpetual motion. What Takashima is doing, if you ask me, is making mindless robots. They take the circuits out of people’s brains that make it possible for them to think for themselves. Their world is like the one that George Orwell depicted in his novel. I’m sure you realize that there are plenty of people who are looking for exactly that kind of brain death. It makes life a lot easier. You don’t have to think about difficult things, just shut up and do what your superiors tell you to do. You never have to starve. To people who are searching for that kind of environment, the Takashima Academy may well be utopia.”

I’ve found that if I can't come up with even an inkling of how my mind might be changed, then I'm not really thinking at all; I'm just set on holding on to my current beliefs.

Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.

Noticing and thinking are sometimes a strain and a bafflement and I wonder if the Designers were aware of that when they made it almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to make use of a recorder. Or when they had us all taught that earliest learned wisdom: “When in doubt, forget it.”

But although I had watched television in the same way many times in my life before, I found I could no longer watch it and not think. “Give yourself to the Screen,” they had taught us. It was as basic as “Don’t ask; relax.” But I could no longer give myself to it. I no longer wanted to keep my mind silent, or use it as a vehicle for disconnected pleasure; I wanted to read, and think, and talk.

Rigid distinctions between the deep and the shallow are generally themselves quite superficial.

It’s time to let the secret out: mathematics is not primarily a matter of plugging numbers into formulas and performing rote computations. It is a way of thinking and questioning that may be unfamiliar to many of us, but is available to almost all of us.