🪂Mind: On Hallucinations (Quotes)

"A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it." (Bertrand Russell, "On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism", 1914)

"Science cannot enter into the dark territory beyond the scope of man's faculties, and where verification, direct or indirect, is not possible. A vivid imagination can people this region with phantasms and be deluded with the hallucination that these creatures of the imagination are real, substantial, objective facts." (Joseph W Mellor," A Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry", 1922)

"The proximate goal of all perception is what we can get our hands upon. If we traverse the distance that separate us from that which we see or hear and find nothing for the hand to manipulate, the experience is an illusion or a hallucination. The world of perceptual reality, the world of physical things, is the world of our contacts and our manipulations, and the distance experience of the eye and the ear means first of all these physical things. Physical things are not only the meaning of what we see and hear; they are also the means we employ to accomplish our ends." (George H Mead, "The Nature of Aesthetic Experience." International Journal of Ethics", Vol. 36 (4), 1926) 

"Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man." (Carl Jung," Wotan", Neue Schweizer Rundschau, 1936)

"There is no theory we may hold and no observation we can make that will retain so much as its old defective reference to the facts if the net be altered. Tinitus, paraestheaias, hallucinations, delusions, confusions and disorientations intervene. Thus empiry confirms that if our nets are undefined, our facts are undefined, and to the 'real' we can attribute not so much as one quality or 'form'. With determi-nation of the net, the unknowable object of knowledge, the 'thing in itself', ceases to be unknowable." (Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine", 1948)

"Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments." (Michel Foucault, "Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason", 1961)

"There is a curious law of art [...] that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination." (Northrop Frye, [in "Design as a Principle in the Arts, The Critical Path and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975"] 1966)

"We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that 'I myself' is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which 'confronts' an 'external' world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange." (Alan Watts, "On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are", 1966)

"Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit - to the conquest of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature." (Alan Watts," Psychedelics and Religious Experience", California Law Review Vol. 56 (1) 1968)

"To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world." (Richard Weaver, "Language is Sermonic" 1970)

"Any attempt to dismiss a phenomenon that is not understood merely by explaining it as hallucination becomes irrelevant when a coherent scientific theory can be applied." (Amit Goswami et al, "The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World" 1993) 

"Even death is unreliable: instead of zero it may be some ghastly hallucination, such as the square root of minus one." (Samuel Beckett [attributed]) 

🪂Mind: On Superintelligence (Quotes)

"A question distinct from, but related to, the question of kinetics is whether there will be one superintelligent power or many? Might an intelligence explosion propel one project so far ahead of all others as to make it able to dictate the future? Or will progress be more uniform, unfurling across a wide front, with many projects participating but none securing an overwhelming and permanent lead?" (Nick Bostrom, "Superintelligence", 2014)

"A system that has the intelligence amplification superpower could use it to bootstrap itself to higher levels of intelligence and to acquire any of the other intellectual superpowers that it does not possess at the outset. But using an intelligence amplification superpower is not the only way for a system to become a full-fledged superintelligence. A system that has the strategizing superpower, for instance, might use it to devise a plan that will eventually bring an increase in intelligence (e.g. by positioning the system so as to become the focus for intelligence amplification work performed by human programmers and computer science researchers)." (Nick Bostrom, "Superintelligence", 2014)

"Some paths to superintelligence require great resources and are therefore likely to be the preserve of large well-funded projects. Whole brain emulation, for instance, requires many different kinds of expertise and lots of equipment. Biological intelligence enhancements and brain–computer interfaces would also have a large scale factor: while a small biotech firm might invent one or two drugs, achieving superintelligence along one of these paths (if doable at all) would likely require many inventions and many tests, and therefore the backing of an industrial sector or a well-funded national program. Achieving collective superintelligence by making organizations and networks more efficient requires even more extensive input, involving much of the world economy." (Nick Bostrom, "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies", 2014)

"We can tentatively define a superintelligence as any intellect that greatly exceeds the cog‐ nitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest." (Nick Bostrom, "Superintelligence", 2014)

"[...] we use the term 'superintelligence' to refer to intellects that greatly outperform the best current human minds across many very general cognitive domains. This is still quite vague. Different kinds of system with rather disparate performance attributes could qualify as superintelligences under this definition. To advance the analysis, it is helpful to disaggregate this simple notion of superintelligence by distinguishing different bundles of intellectual super-capabilities. There are many ways in which such decomposition could be done. Here we will differentiate between three forms: speed superintelligence, collective superintelligence, and quality superintelligence." (Nick Bostrom, "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies", 2014)

"We are teaching AI software that will evolve into superintelligence; and superintelligence will in turn teach humankind and explain the Scriptures." (Newton Lee American, "The Transhumanism Handbook", 2019

"All in all, it seems questionable whether a superintelligence can be properly and systematically controlled when it has reached that level. After all, its superpowers can at least in principle be used to overcome any human-designed control mechanism." (Yves Hilpisch, "Artificial Intelligence in Finance A Python-Based Guide", 2021)

"It is to be assumed that any form of superintelligence will have instrumental goals that are independent of its main goal. This might lead to a number of unintended consequences, such as the insatiable quest to acquire ever more resources with any means that seem promising." (Yves Hilpisch, "Artificial Intelligence in Finance A Python-Based Guide", 2021)

"Of all the possible paths to superintelligence, AI seems to be the most promising one. Recent successes in the field based on rein‐ forcement learning and neural networks have led to another AI spring, after a number of AI winters. Many even now believe that a superintelligence might not be as far away as we thought even a few years ago. The field currently is characterized by much faster advancements than originally predicted by experts only a short while ago." (Yves Hilpisch, "Artificial Intelligence in Finance A Python-Based Guide", 2021)

"[...] what we understand as hyperintelligence may only be realized in an artificial form. This suggests an inner evolutionary logic that drives the development towards hyperintelligence. Namely, that when any species in the universe reaches a level of intelligence equivalent to ours – and thus learns to master fire, language, and trade – the development of advanced AI becomes almost inevitable. Even though it may then take hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of years to move from the mastery of fire to the development of AI, any species that reaches this level will sooner or later combine itself further to create computers and AI technology. These technologies will then develop trillions of times faster than their biological creators. Even if living beings with access to AI will be able to do some genetic uplifting towards higher IQ, ultimately it will then be their computers, and not the biological beings themselves, that achieve hyperintelligence." (Lars Tvede et al, "Hyperintelligence How the Universe Engineers Its Own Mind", 2025)