That could sound like a poke at religion, but it’s not. He was speaking to the Westernized post-Enlightenment audience in a way they experience reality. As if our expectations and paradigms don’t lead to what is sensed. His family had indigenous worldviews in it alongside European and his novels and short stories were very much trying to dismantle the split in Western perception. Not religious in any traditional sense, he wasn’t anti-religious either.
Non-objectivists still generally believe certain things/attitudes/ideas are wise. So that quote would be aimed at them. And isn’t the potential problem with objectivists - the ones one does not like - that they actually do tend to take action?
Suicide
“Preventing a suicide is not necessarily a beneficent act if it forces the potential suicide to continue in a life of misery.” Gene Lester
Cue God, right?
“Suicidal pain includes the feeling that one has lost all capacity to effect emotional change. The agony is excruciating and looks as if it will never end. There is the feeling of having been beaten down for a very long time. There are feelings of agitation, emptiness, and incoherence. ‘Snap out of it and get on with your life,’ sounds like a demand to high jump ten feet.” L. Conroy
Or you can start here: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness: Styron, William: 9780679736394: Amazon.com: Books
“No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.” Albert Camus
An a priori life? An a priori death?
“No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.” Al Alvarez
Actually, I figured that.
“Four thousand years ago, an Egyptian wrote out his despair onto papyrus in the form of a narrative and four short-versed poems. This document, now in the Berlin Museum, is thought by British psychiatrist Chris Thomas to be the first suicide note…"
‘Death is before me today
As a man longs to see his house
When he has spent years in captivity.’ Kay Redfield Jamison
Doesn’t surprise me.
“I can just close my eyes and let myself fall into oblivion. Maybe I’ll hit the exact same rocks and my blood will mingle with his and maybe there’s some kind of life after death and he’s waiting for me there with his hand outstretched just like mine.
But…
I don’t want to die.
I try to twist my body backwards and pain shoots up my neck.
It’s too late.
I chose life too late.” Cat Clarke
Ambiguity, let’s call it. If not flat-out ambivalence.
Ex Machina
Nathan: It’s funny. You know. No matter how rich you get, shit goes wrong. You can’t insulate yourself from it. I used to think it was death and taxes you couldn’t avoid, but it’s actually death and shit.
Bullshit in particular?
Caleb: Why did you give her sexuality? An AI doesn’t need a gender. She could have been a grey box.
Nathan: Actually I don’t think that’s true. Can you give an example of consciousness at any level, human or animal, that exists without a sexual dimension?
Caleb: They have sexuality as an evolutionary reproductive need.
Nathan: What imperative does a grey box have to interact with another grey box? Can consciousness exist without interaction? Anyway, sexuality is fun, man. If you’re gonna exist, why not enjoy it? You want to remove the chance of her falling in love and fucking? And the answer to your real question, you bet she can fuck.
Caleb: What?
Nathan: In between her legs, there’s an opening, with a concentration of sensors. You engage them in the right way, creates a pleasure response. So if you wanted to screw her, mechanically speaking, you could. And she’d enjoy it.
Let’s run this by Spock’s brain.
Or, perhaps, Spock’s penis?
Caleb [talking about ending the project]: It’s not up to me…
Ava: Why is it up to anyone?
AI…and God?
Nathan: Buddy, your head’s been so fucked with.
Caleb: I don’t think it’s me whose head is fucked.
Nathan: I don’t know, man. I woke up this morning to a tape of you slicing your arm open and punching the mirror. You seem pretty fucked up to me.
Caleb: You’re a bastard.
Nathan: Yeah, well, I understand why you’d think that. But believe it or not, I’m actually the guy that’s on your side.
Or, as Ava suspects, they are both bastards.
Caleb: Some people believe language exists from birth. And what is learned is the ability to attach words and structure to the latent ability.
Of course, some people will believe almost anything.
Ava: Would you like to know how old I am?
Caleb: Sure.
Ava: I’m one.
Caleb: One what? One year or one day?
Ava: One.
One works for me.
Infinity
“Remember your connection with the cosmos. Remember your connection with infinity and that remembrance will give you the freedom.” Amit Ray
People say things like this [here, for example] as though merely believing it’s true is what makes it true.
“When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of ‘jazz’ as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.” David Sedaris
Your own squirrels and chipmunks might be different.
“We think of infinity as a really big number, but it’s not. It’s endlessness. Endlessness is a really strange idea in a universe that is defined by its endings.” John Green
Good to know, he supposed.
“Einstein’s remark on the limitlessness of human stupidity is made even more disturbing by the discovery that infinity comes in different sizes. Answering ‘How much stupider?’ or trying to measure the minimal idiocy bounded by an IQ test are mysteries which are themselves infinitely less alarming than simply attempting to tally the anti-savant population. One can count all the natural idiots (they’re the same as the even number of idiots – twice as many), but the number of real idiots continues forever: all the counting idiots (finger reckoners) plus all the fractional idiots (geniuses on a bad day) plus all the irrational idiots (they go on and on and on) add up to a world in which the approaching upper limit of our set of natural resources has its complement in the inexhaustible lower limit of our set of mental ones.” Bauvard
Infinite stupidity? Wouldn’t surprise me.
“Very young children often accept the paranormal as ‘normal’ until adults squeeze it out of them.” Doug Dillon
Next up: all the stuff adults squeeze into them.
“I believe, if there is some sort of higher power, the universe is it. Whenever religious people ask me where the universe came from, I tell them that it has always been here, and was never created. The Big Bang theory is based on the fact that the universe is expanding right now. And if you rewind the tape, the universe appears to be shrinking. If you rewind the tape far enough, eventually the universe must be just one singular point. Or so the theory goes. But what if the universe has not always been expanding? What if it’s pulsating, and one pulse takes trillions of years, and right now the universe is inhaling, and before that, trillions of years ago, it was exhaling?” Oliver Gaspirtz
Sheer speculation, let’s call it.
Stupidity
“The House of Representatives truly represents America, and because of that, about a third of its members are complete fucking morons.” Thor Benson
Actually, it’s closer to half its members now.
“Whether it’s personal foibles or a bureaucrat’s ego, the stubborn defence of stupidity is unforgivable.” Stewart Stafford
Of course, some of us take it all in stride here.
“. . . every now and then I do think life is a crock, there’s no getting around it. Basically, it’s really just awful. I do think it’s stupidity that makes the world go round.” Edward Gorey
Still does, I suppose.
“Stupid people make stupid people famous.” Abhijit Naskar
Infamous too.
“Only idiots are confident. It requires a great amount of wisdom and knowledge to be confused.” Abhishek Leela Pandey
Idiots and objectivists.
“Oh, and Zaphod?"
“Er, yeah?”
“If you ever find you need help again, you know, if you’re in trouble, need a hand out of a tight corner…”
“Yeah?”
"Please don’t hesitate to get lost.” Douglas Adams
And the glum equivalent of that here, he snorted.
15 characters.
Glib may be a better word.
Communism
“The only way we’ll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba – yes Cuba too.” Malcolm X
Fast forward to the present.
“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” Adam Smith
Do tell.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist.” Hannah Arendt
Not much in history that doesn’t explain. And, perhaps, never will.
“Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.” Frank Zappa
Alas, I still do.
“In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.” George Orwell
The masses, let’s call them.
“Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.” Vladimir Lenin
Cue the revolutionary clouds?
Determinism
“You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.” Robert M. Sapolsky
Next up: cue dasein.
Mine though not his, okay?
“… Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism…” Eric Chaisson
Define almost?
“Belief is not subject to the will. Men think as they must. Children do not, and cannot, believe exactly as they were taught. They are not exactly like their parents. They differ in temperament, in experience, in capacity, in surroundings. And so there is a continual, though almost imperceptible change. There is development, conscious and unconscious growth, and by comparing long periods of time we find that the old has been almost abandoned, almost lost in the new.” Robert G. Ingersoll
On the other hand, the more things change, the more they could never not change.
“Know, then, that now, precisely now, these people are more certain than ever before that they are completely free, and at the same time they themselves have brought us their freedom and obediently laid it at our feet. It is our doing, but is it what you wanted? This sort of freedom?’
Again I don’t understand’, Alyosha interrupted, ‘Is he being ironic? Is he laughing?’
Not in the least. He precisely lays it to his and his colleagues’ credit that they have finally overcome freedom, and have done so in order to make people happy.” Fyodor Dostoevsky
In other words, believing only in those things that don’t upset you.
“Life is more than just steering a course around pain.” Stephen King
Though, for some, not much more.
“Many scientists have tried to make determinism and complementarity the basis of conclusions that seem to me weak and dangerous; for instance, they have used Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to bolster up human free will, though his principle, which applies exclusively to the behavior of electrons and is the direct result of microphysical measurement techniques, has nothing to do with human freedom of choice. It is far safer and wiser that the physicist remain on the solid ground of theoretical physics itself and eschew the shifting sands of philosophic extrapolations.” Louis de Broglie
Next up: the shifting clouds.
Hypocrisy
"Priests have never been great men for the truth.” Bernard Cornwell
Well, other than their own. Or else, for example.
“A life lived is a much better gauge of someone’s belief, than what they say.” J.S. Felts
Cue dasein here some will insist.
“If I know that I belong to a self-satisfied elite who are sacrificing the common good through an excess of arrogance, this liberates me from criticism, and I come out with twice the prestige.” Muriel Barbery
Go ahead, try to convince them otherwise.
But I did not expect science merely to extend lifespan, feed the hungry, cure disease, and shrink the world with jets and cell phones. I also expected science to banish the evils of human thought—prejudice and superstition, irrational beliefs and false fears. I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan’s memorable phrase, ‘a candle in a demon-haunted world.’ And here, I am not so pleased with the impact of science. Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity. Some of the demons that haunt our world in recent years are invented by scientists. The world has not benefited from permitting these demons to escape.” Michael Crichton
Of course, they run rampant here.
“Human beings are, necessarily, actors who cannot become something before they have first pretended to be it; and they can be divided, not into the hypocritical and the sincere, but into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.” W.H Auden
Of course, that runs rampant here.
“If you don’t have a filter in your mind, you will immediately offend those who wear filters and masks. To avoid offending, you will also install a filter and become ‘sane’.” Shunya
Would you like me to take mine out?
Quantum Physics
“I’m writing these words on February 28th, barely two months after the event. At least I think I am.
I can’t be sure when, or even if, it actually happened. Or what really took place. Then again: what is truth, if infinitely many truths can exist at the same time? But let me start from the beginning.” Andrzej Wronka
Of course, your own beginning may be different.
“Reality bends not to force, but to frequency; when your inner state aligns with the pattern of what you seek, creation has no choice but to mirror it back to you.” Maurice Price
What could possibly be clearer?
“Science is like that—it doesn’t need dressing up in the hand-me-downs of someone else’s philosophy, because it is full of its own delights, mysteries, and surprises.” John Gribbin
What could possibly be more problematic?
“Quantum is not only physics. It is a new way of understanding reality.” Ludmila Morozova-Buss
On the other hand, or else?
“The quantum revolution is not the discovery of quantum physics. It is the transition from understanding quantum reality to engineering it.” Ludmila Morozova-Buss
Artificially or otherwise.
“This may be old hat to some, but in the quantum realm, the things we take for granted aren’t really things at all.” Sol Luckman
Do they know that?
Chaos
“In the noise of the world, it is hard to hear our own rhythm.” Susan Mako
And it’s not like we’re the exception.
“Chaos is just logic that decided to be flamboyant. Logic is merely the polite cousin of chaos, tiptoeing through life in sensible shoes.” Todd Lyons
Hell, even I won’t go this far.
“. . . surely that is the main thing, tranquility, this is what this person seeks in the desired distance, some tranquility from the unspeakably oppressive, painful, insane disquiet that seizes him whenever he happens to think of his starting point, that infinitely foreign land where he is now, and from where he must leave, because everything here is intolerable, cold, sad, bleak, and deadly . . .” László Krasznahorkai
Tranquility. Let’s try that here, he proposed.
“It’s impossible to predict at the best of times how things are going to pan out. You ask to what extent someone like me, who has collected large amounts of data over a long period of time, can calculate the most likely course of the conflict. Well, I’m afraid I can’t. Any forward-moving enterprise is going to contain an element of chaos.” Olga Ravn
Let’s find one here, he snorted.
“No democratic government should ever assume that arguments for democracy or for the rule of law are somehow obvious or self-evident. Authoritarian narratives are designed to undermine the innate appeal of those ideas, to characterize dictatorship as stable and democracy as chaotic" Anne Applebaum
Now that sounds familiar.
“What will you do now?’
‘Whatever I can. As useless as that might be.” David Annandale
Now that sounds familiar.
Solitude
“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.” Paul Tillich
I don’t know about the first though.
"I’ll flee this bitter world where vice is king,
And seek some spot unpeopled and apart
Where I’ll be free to have an honest heart.” Molière
A misanthrope, let’s call him.
“In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.” Flannery O’Connor
Okay, so what are we doing here?
“At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.” Rainer Marie Rilke
Unless, perhaps, failure is not an option.
“I can be by myself because I’m never lonely; I’m simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.” Bohumil Hrabal
Yeah, something like that.
“Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms.” Guy de Maupassant
I’ll take my chances then.
Rationalism
“To select arbitrarily a set of first principles, and to make all our studies subordinate to them, is in effect to establish an intellectual dictatorship and to kill the freedom of mind. It is true that it would give us orderliness, but it would be the orderliness of death.” John Buchan
Yo, Mr. Objectivist…rebuttal please.
“What troubles me most is when religion seeks to dictate social functioning through the authority of its scriptures. The obvious question then arises: Who authored those scriptures?” Sajal Garg
Start here: List of religious texts - Wikipedia
“The ‘Empirical Fallacy’ is that experience is knowledge when in fact it is just experience. A person could have infinite experiences and literally know nothing about what reality is. A person could perform a trillion observations and have no more clue about what reality is than someone performing divination in the ancient world, or a cockroach. It is not perceptualism that has led to humanity’s body of knowledge, it is conceptualism. Humanity doesn’t perceive better today, it conceives better, and that is purely thanks to mathematics, reason and logic.” Thomas Stark
Next up: the mathematics of…abortion?
“The great rationalist Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ The religious mystic the Buddha said, ‘I think, therefore I am not.’ Why is the Buddha much more popular than Descartes? Because the average person barely thinks at all.” Thomas Stark
New thread?
“Why is there something rather than nothing? Only because something can exist as nothing – via the mathematical capacity to express ‘nothing’ in non-zero terms, e.g. e iπ + 1 = 0. In other words, wherever you see 'nothing ’ (zero), you might in fact be confronting e iπ + 1 (‘something’ ), without knowing it. Only mathematics has this unique capacity to the ground state of the universe. The compulsory ground state of the universe is zero, the minimum value possible. There is no sufficient reason for any arbitrary non-zero number to serve as the ground state.” Brother Abaris
You tell me.
“This, in turn, brings us to the fundamental error of those sworn foes of Romanticism, the rationalists, who are for ever chasing the idea that what the sentence expresses is a judgment or a thought. They sit at their writing tables, surrounded by books, and research into the minutia of their own thoughts and writings. Consequently the “thought” appears to them as the object of the speaking, and (since usually they sit alone) they forget that beyond the speaking there is a hearing, beyond a question an answer, beyond an Ego a Tu. They say “speech,” but what they mean is the oration, the lecture, the discourse. Their view of the origin of speech is, therefore, false, for they look upon it as a monologue.” Oswald Spengler
See, I told you. Whatever that means.
Faith
“Yeah. I’m an asshole. But I promise you, when the shit rolls downhill and you need someone with a shovel, I’m an asshole who can get the job done.” Lotchie Burton
Let’s run this by the assholes here. 
“In the beginning there was faith - which is childish; trust - which is vain; and illusion - which is dangerous.” Elie Wiesel
If you get his drift.
“‘Wait on the Lord’" is a constant refrain in the Psalms, and it is a necessary word, for God often keeps us waiting. He is not in such a hurry as we are, and it is not his way to give more light on the future than we need for action in the present, or to guide us more than one step at a time. When in doubt, do nothing, but continue to wait on God. When action is needed, light will come.” J.I. Packer
Any particular God?
“A man who is intimate with God is not intimidated by man.” Leonard Ravenhill
No, really, define intimate here.
“To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, needs courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern—and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.” Erich Fromm
Theoretically as it were.
“If there is a divine creator, some ultimate moral authority, then why do bad things happen to good people? And why would this deity create people at all, since people are such imperfect beings?” R.F. Kuang
That again. And well it should be.
Elmore Leonard
The personality and the ego scream, while the soul whispers.
Either that or whimpers.
You look back, Max said, you can’t believe that much time went by. You look ahead and you think, shit, if it goes that fast I better do something with it.
Sounds about right. Whatever that means.
I’ve learned if you’re ever angry enough to hit somebody, don’t do it. Cool down and get yourself a pistol.
So, how logical – reasonable – is that?
Don’t go into great detail describing places and things… You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
Someone run this by…Maia?
What you’ll have to do now is ride the rap, as they say. It’s all anybody has to do.
Let’s run this by Raylan Givens. Or, perhaps, someone here who has “done time”?
He called out to no one in particular, “Fire in the Hole!”.
And no one in particular called out, “which hole in particular?”
Suicide
“The mind, when it reaches its limits, must make a judgment and choose its conclusions. This is where suicide and the reply stand.” Albert Camus
What’s yours?
“You don’t know what cold is until you’ve experienced the cold you feel when the blood is draining out of your body.” Ryū Murakami
Tell me about it!
“It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don’t think that’s true—unless it isn’t true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward—shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It’s a mess in there.” Martin Amis
Tell me about it!
“During a warm winter rain…the basins of her collarbones collected water.” Jeffrey Eugenides
Never heard of that before.
“What people never understand is that depression isn’t about the outside; it’s about the inside.” Jasmine Warga
Right, like it can’t possibly be both the inside and the outside stuff.
“It is always consoling to think of suicide; it’s what gets one through many a bad night.” Gillian Flynn
Amen.
Ex Machina
Caleb: I’m still trying to figure the examination formats. Yeah, it feels like testing Ava through conversation is kind of a closed loop.
Nathan: It’s a closed loop?
Caleb: Like testing a chess computer by only playing chess.
Nathan: How else do you test a chess computer?
Caleb: Well, it depends. You know, I mean, you can play it to find out if it makes good moves, but… but that won’t tell you if it knows that it’s playing chess. And it won’t tell you if it knows what chess is.
Nathan: Uh huh. So it’s simulation versus actual.
Caleb: Yes, yeah. And I think being able to differentiate between the two is the Turing Test you want me to perform.
Bingo? Being able to play chess well and being able to grasp what that means?
Nathan: Answer me this: how do you feel about her? Nothing analytical, just - how you feel.
Caleb: I feel - that she is fucking amazing.
And – of course – drop dead gorgeous.
Ava: Do you want to be my friend?
Caleb: Of course.
Ava: Will it be possible?
Caleb: Why would it not be?
Ava: Our conversations are one-sided. You ask circumspect questions and study my responses.
Caleb: Yes.
Ava: You learn about me and I learn nothing about you. That’s not a foundation on which friendships are based.
Caleb: So what? You want me to talk about myself?
Ava: Yes.
Caleb: Where… Okay, where do I start?
Ava: It’s your decision. I’m interested to see what you’ll choose.
Click, of course.
Ava: Do you like Mozart?
Caleb: I like Depeche Mode.
Some actually like both, he suspected.
Nathan [about Kyoko]: I told you, you’re wasting your time talking to her. However, you would not be wasting your time… if you were dancing with her.
Ask me about Kyoko. Philosophically, of course.
Nathan: This building isn’t a house. It’s a research facility. Buried in these walls is enough fiber optic cable to reach the moon and lasso it. And I want to talk to you about what I’m researching. I want to share it with you. In fact, I wanna share it with you so much, it’s eating me up inside. But there’s something I need you to do for me first.
Caleb: [reading contract] “Blue Book non-disclosure agreement.”
Nathan: Take your time. Read it over.
Caleb: [continues reading] “The signee agrees to regular data audit with unlimited access, to confirm that no disclosure of information has taken place in public or private forums, using any means of communication, including but not limited to that which is disclosed orally or in written or electronic form.”
[frightened]
Caleb: I think I need a lawyer.
Nathan: It’s standard.
Caleb: It doesn’t feel very standard.
Nathan: Okay, it’s not standard. What can I tell you, Caleb? You don’t have to sign it. You know, we can spend the next few days just shooting pool, getting drunk together, bonding. And when you discover what you’ve missed out on, in about a year, you’re gonna regret it for the rest of your life.
[Caleb signs the contract immediately]
Nathan: Good call.
Let’s run this by Ava and Kyoko.
Marylin Monroe
I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.
So much for the dumb blonde trope.
Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
Not here it’s not.
If you can make a woman laugh, you can make her do anything.
Some women, he suspected.
The real lover is the man who can thrill you by kissing your forehead or smiling into your eyes or just staring into space.
Next up: the real lover is the woman who can thrill you by…
A wise girl kisses but doesn’t love, listens but doesn’t believe, and leaves before she is left.
No exceptions, of course. But, sure, points taken.
I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.
And look how that turned out.