Waking Life

I love this movie... all the philosophical questions and theories are amazing.
I just wanted to hear, for those of you that have seen this movie, what you thought about it and just to hear your POV.

im just gonna quote the movie a bit!

"They say that dreams are real only as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?"

"Professor: The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fasion, 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 passionately, in the 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 dispair, but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre [an existentialist philosopher] once interviewed said he never really felt a day of dispair in his life. The 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."

This is a long one.. but one of my favs!

"Neo-human guy: If you're looking at the highlights of human development, you have to look at the evolution of the organism, and then add the development of the interaction with its environment. Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life, proceeding through the hominid, coming to the evolution of mankind: neanderthal, cro-magnon man. Now, interestingly, what you're looking at here are three strains: biological, anthropological (development of cities, cultures), 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-scale that's involved here: two billion years for life, six million years
for the hominid, a 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 agriculture, when you get to the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution, you're looking at ten thousand years, four hundred years, a hundred and fifty 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 that we should see it manifest itself within our lifetimes, within a generation. The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence; The analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism, and you knit the two together with neurobiology. Before, under the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate. But, under the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, non-competitive grouping independent from the external. Now what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually-centered process eminating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process, where the individual is just at the whim of the collective.
So, you produce a neo-human with a new individuality, a 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 pods on intelligence, as abilty pods on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until you reach a crescendo. In a way, it could be imagined as an almost 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 could be dramatically counter-intuitive; That's the interesting part. The old evolution is cold, it's sterile, it's efficient. And, it's manifestations are those social adaptations. We're talking about parasitism, dominance, morality, war, predation. These will 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."

happy reading

 

yea some of its prety confusing.. ill look for some simple ones like... this one! lol

Ethan: I keep thinking about something you said.

Julie: Something I said?

Ethan: Yeah. About how you often feel like you're observing your life from the perspective of an old woman about to die. You remember that?

Julie: Yeah. I still feel that way sometimes; like I'm looking back on my life. Like my waking life is her memories.

Ethan: Mmm, exactly. I heard that Tim Leary said, as he was dying, that he was looking forward to the moment when his body was dead, but his brain was still alive - you know how they say that there's still 6-12 minutes of brain activity after everything else has shut down?

Julie: Mmm.

Ethan: And a second of dream consciousness, right? Well that's infinitely longer than a waking second. You know what I'm saying?
Julie: Oh yeah yeah yeah, definitely. For instance I wake up and it's 10:12 and then I go back to sleep and I have those long, intricate, beautiful dreams that seem to last for hours and then I wake up and it's...10:13

Ethan: Yeah, exactly. So then 6-12 minutes, right? Of brain activity. I mean...that could be your whole life. I mean you are that woman looking back over everything.

Julie: Okay so what if I am? Then what would you be in all that?

Ethan: Whatever I am right now. I mean, yeah maybe I only exist in your mind, but I'm still just as real as anything else.

Julie: Yeah. I've been thinking also about something you said.

Ethan: What's that?

Julie: Just about reincarnation and where all the new souls come from over time. Everybody always says they are the reincarnation of Cleopatra or Alexander the Great. I always want to tell them they were probably some dumbfuck like everybody else. I mean, it's impossible. Think about it. The world population has doubled in the past 40 years, right? So if you really believe in that ego thing of one eternal soul, then you have only 50% chance of your soul being over 40, and for it to be over 150 years old, then it's only one out of six.

Ethan: Right, so what are you saying? That reincarnation doesn't exist, or that we're all young souls, or half of us are first round humans?

Julie: No, no, what I'm trying to say is that somehow I believe reincarnation is just a poetic expression of what collective memory really is. There was this article by this bio-chemist I read not long ago, and he was talking about how when a member of our species is born, it has a billion years of memory to draw on. And this is where we inherit our instincts.

Ethan: I like that. It's like there's this whole telepathic thing going on that we're all a part of, whether we're conscious of it or not. That would explain why there are all these seemingly spontaneous worldwide innovative leaps in science and the arts, you know, like the same results popping up everywhere independent of each other. Some guy on a computer figures something out, and then almost simultaneously a bunch of other people all over the world figure out the same thing. They did this study where they isolated a group of people over time, you know, and monitored their abilities at crossword puzzles in relation to the general population, and they secretly gave them a day-old crossword, one that had already been answered by thousands of other people, and their scores went up dramatically. Like 20%. So it's like once the answers are out there, people can pick up on them. Like we're all telepathically sharing our experiences.

And heres another one...

Louis: There are two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffer from a lack of life, and those who suffer from an over-abundance of life. I have always found myself in the second category. When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity is not, essentially, any different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between, say, Plato or Nietzsche, and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved. Why so few? Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress, rather this endless and futile addition of zeros? No greater values have developed. Hell, the Greeks 3,000 years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential. The answer to that can be found in another question, and that's this: which is the most universal human characteristic: fear or laziness?