Best 6 quotes of Steve Volk on MyQuotes

Steve Volk

  • By Anonym
    Steve Volk

    Frank White, who literally wrote the book on the overview effect, is also part of the Overview Institute. And he thinks of space travel largely as Mitchell does—an evolutionary step. "If fish could think at our level of intelligence," White said, "back before humanity existed, and some fish were starting to venture up on land, a lot of them would be saying, just as we do now about space: 'Why would we want to go there? What's the point?' And they'd have literally no idea of what venturing onto land was going to mean".

  • By Anonym
    Steve Volk

    At one conference Hameroff told Dennett, publicly, "You know, Dan, maybe the reason you like this [mechanistic] idea is because you're a zombie. And maybe the reason I see things differently is because, I'm not." Hameroff told me he was half-joking. But Dennett took offense. "I wound up apologizing," says Hameroff. "I guess he only likes the idea of being a zombie if we're all zombies.

  • By Anonym
    Steve Volk

    De Bono argues that the West's tradition of settling disagreement by debate or argument is an example of overreliance on logic.

  • By Anonym
    Steve Volk

    It is the finding of neuroscience, in fact, that belief is at least in part a matter of emotion. Whatever we believe to be true lights up areas of our brain responsible for self-identification and the processing of feelings and sentiments. If we believe something, then, the object of our belief becomes an emotionally potent aspect of our own self-image. There is some common sense to this, too: the most passionate of believers and the most strident of New Atheists are palpably, visibly fired up and ready to defend their positions.

  • By Anonym
    Steve Volk

    The Fiddle Creek Steakhouse [in Stephenville, TX] started selling what they called an 'Alien Secretion' shot: ¾ shot of Malibu rum, ¾ shot of melon or Midori liqueur, ½ ounce of sweet and sour mix, ½ ounce of pineapple juice.

  • By Anonym
    Steve Volk

    This country has a UFO problem, after all. You might not have been aware we have one, or thought about it in these terms, but we do have a UFO problem: namely, we don't seem to understand what UFO really means. So here it is: a UFO is an unidentified flying object. So any time we see some object flying in the sky that we can't positively identify, we've seen a UFO. But in the same way the words paranormal and supernatural have been conflated, we now equate UFO with alien spacecraft. How this came to be is easily understandable. If we've learned one thing in this book already, people don't like the unknown very much. And so, if we believe we're being visited by other civilizations, we read the piles of books and articles on unexplained lights in the sky, then fill in the massive gaps—with wild tales of alien races, interstellar technology, and government conspiracies. If we don't believe, we hear someone saw an unexplained light in the sky and assume, first, that he's claiming to have seen E.T. Then we figure what he really saw was an airplane, Venus, swamp gas, or a helicopter, and he must be a bit foolish—maybe even a UFO nut. Then we laugh.