Thousand Words - Waking Life: Life Lessons lyrics

(Philosophy professor Robert Solomon at the University of Texas at Austin) "The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion, or historical curiosity, is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century. I'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life pa**ionately, a sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the ability to make something of yourself, and feeling good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it's a philosophy of despair, but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre, once interviewed, said he never really felt a day of despair in his life. But one thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as a real kind of exuberance of feeling on top of it. It's like your life is yours to create. I've read the postmodernists with some interest, even admiration, but when I read them I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more that you talk about a person as a social construction, or as a confluence of forces, or as fragmented, or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility he's not talking about something abstract. He's not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. It's something very concrete; it's you and me talking; making decisions; doing things and taking the consequences. It might be true that there are six billion people in the world, and counting. Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms. Makes a difference to other people and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It's always our decision who we are." (Screenwriter Kim Krizan screenwriter talking in a house) "Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from. I mean, it came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another. And it had to be easy when it was just simple survival. Like, you know, 'water.' We came up with a sound for that. Or 'Saber-toothed tiger right behind you.' We came up with a sound for that. But when it gets really interesting, I think, is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we're experiencing. What is, like, frustration? Or what is anger? Or love? When I say love, the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person's ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain—you know, through their memories of love or lack of love—and they register what I'm saying, and they say yes they understand. But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert; they're just symbols; they're dead, you know? And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed; it's unspeakable. And yet, you know, when we communicate with one another, and we feel that we've connected, and we think that we're understood, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion. And that feeling might be transient, but I think it's what we live for." (Chemistry professor Eamonn Healy at University of Texas at Austin) "If we're looking at the highlights of human development you have to look at the evolution of the organism, and then at the development of its interaction with the environment. Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life, proceed through the hominid, coming to the evolution of mankind: Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man. Now, interestingly, what you're looking at here are three strings: biological, anthropological—development of the cities—and cultural, which is human expression. Now, what you've seen here is the evolution of populations, not so much the evolution of individuals. And, in addition, if you look at the time scales that are involved here—two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, one-hundred-thousand years for mankind as we know it—you're beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then, when you get to agricultural, when you get to scientific revolution and industrial revolution, you're looking at ten-thousand years, 400 years, 150 years. You're seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time. What that means is that as we go through the new evolution it's going to telescope to the point we should be able to see it manifest itself within our lifetime, within this generation. The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and an*log. The digital is artificial intelligence; the an*log results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism; and you knit the two together with neurobiology. Before, on the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow, and dominate. But on the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, non-competitive grouping, independent from the external. And what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a pa**ive process, where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, you produce a neo-human, okay, with a new individuality and new consciousness. But that's only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until you reach a crescendo. In a way, could be imagined as an enormous, instantaneous fulfillment of human—human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences, parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space. And the manifestations of this neo-human type evolution, manifestations could be dramatically counter-intuitive—that's the interesting part. The old evolution is cold; it's sterile; it's efficient, okay? And its manifestations of those social adaptation. We're talking about parasitism, dominance, morality, okay? Uh, war, predation. These would be subject to de-emphasis; these will be subject to de-evolution. The new evolutionary paradigm will give us the human traits of truth, of loyalty, of justice, of freedom. These will be the manifestations of the new evolution, and that is what we would hope to see from this. That would be nice."