“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” - Carl Sagan

“So the following disjunctive conclusion is inevitable: Either mathematics is incompletable in this sense, that its evident axioms can never be comprised in a finite rule, that is to say, the human mind (even within the realm of pure mathematics) infinitely surpasses the powers of any finite machine, or else there exist absolutely unsolvable diophantine problems of the type specified.” Kurt Gödel

"But surpassing all stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, though distant by mighty intervals of place and time! Of talking with those who are in India; of speaking to those who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years; and with what facility, by the different arrangements of twenty characters upon a page! Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of mankind." - Galileo Galilei

Mogged

arxiv.org/abs/2610.27918

“Many kinds of men devote themselves to Science, and not all for the sake of Science herself. There are some who come into her temple because it offers them the opportunity to display their particular talents. To this class of men science is a kind of sport in the practice of which they exult, just as an athlete exults in the exercise of his muscular prowess. There is another class of men who come into the temple to make an offering of their brain pulp in the hope of securing a profitable return. These men are scientists only by the chance of some circumstance which offered itself when making a choice of career. If the attending circumstance had been different they might have become politicians or captains of business. Should an angel of God descend and drive from the Temple of Science all those who belong to the categories I have mentioned, I fear the temple would be nearly emptied. But a few worshipers would still remain—some from former times and some from ours. To these latter belongs our Planck. And that is why we love him.” - Albert Einstein on Max Planck

“Whatever has the air of a paradox, and is contrary to the first and most unprejudiced notions of mankind is often greedily embraced by philosophers, as showing the superiority of their science, which could discover opinions so remote from vulgar conception. On the other hand, any thing proposed to us, which causes surprise and admiration, gives such a satisfaction to the mind, that it indulges itself in those agreeable emotions, and will never be persuaded that its pleasure is entirely without foundation.” David Hume

“It is not possible to mechanise mathematical reasoning, i.e., it will never be possible to replace the mathematician by a machine, even if you confine yourself to number-theoretic problems.” - Kurt Gödel

“In speaking here of "comprehensibility," the expression is used in its most modest sense. It implies: the production of some sort of order among sense impressions, this order being produced by the creation of general concepts, relations between these concepts, and by definite relations of some kind between the concepts and sense experience. It is in this sense that the world of our sense experiences is comprehensible. The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.” - Albert Einstein

The stultification of humanity will bring the goal of a superhuman machine one step closer.

"Paralysis" proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/21/art…

"If mathematics describes an objective world just like physics, there is no reason why inductive methods should not be applied in mathematics just the same as in physics. The fact is that in mathematics we still have the same attitude today that in former times one had toward all science, namely, we try to derive everything by cogent proofs from the definitions (that is, in ontological terminology, from the essences of things). Perhaps this method, if it claims monopoly, is as wrong in mathematics as it was in physics."- Kurt Gödel

“Let us get down to bedrock facts. The beginning of every act of knowing, and therefore the starting point of every science, must be in our own personal experiences. I am using the word, experience, here in its technical philosophical connotation, namely, our direct sensory perception of outside things. These are the immediate data of the act of knowing. They form the first and most real hook on which we fasten the thought-chain of science; because the material that furnishes, as it were, the building-stones of science is received either directly through our own perception of outer things or indirectly, through the information of others, that is to say from former researchers and teachers and publications and so on. There are no other sources of scientific knowledge.” - Max Planck

“Science has provided the possibility of liberation for human beings from hard labor, but science itself is not a liberator. It creates means, not goals. Man should use them for reasonable goals. When the ideals of humanity are war and conquest, those tools become as dangerous as a razor in the hand of a child of three.”- Albert Einstein

"Mathematics does not consist in developing the logical consequences of given assumptions omnilaterally, but intuition and the life of the scientific mind pose the problems, and these cannot be solved by mechanical rules like computing exercises." - Hermann Weyl

"Just as consistency guarantees that not both a and ¬a can be obtained, completeness would then guarantee that always one of them can be obtained. Completeness in this sense would only be ensured by the establishment of such procedural rules of proof as would lead demonstrably to a solution for every pertinent problem. Mathematics would thereby be trivialized.
But such a philosopher's stone has not been discovered and never will be discovered. Mathematics does not consist in developing the logical consequences of given assumptions omnilaterally, but intuition and the life of the scientific mind pose the problems, and these cannot be solved by mechanical rules like computing exercises. The deductive procedure that may lead to their solution is not predesigned but has to be discovered in each case. Analogy, experience, and an intuition capable of integrating multifarious connections are our principal resources in this task." - Hermann Weyl

"Pure logical thinking can give us no knowledge whatsoever of the world of experience; all knowledge about reality begins with experience and terminates in it." - Albert Einstein

So understanding has not been the goal but the bottleneck, and thus is now an obstacle.

Studying anything should be forbidden, as it may cause understanding.
Observing reality with curiosity should be forbidden too, of course, as it may cause the desire for understanding.

"Verification differs from proof precisely because it is analytical, and because it leads to nothing. It leads to nothing because the conclusion is nothing but the premisses translated into another language.
A real proof, on the other hand, is fruitful, because the conclusion is in a sense more general than the premises. The equality 2+2=4 can be verified because it is particular. Each individual enunciation in mathematics may always be verified in the same way.
But if mathematics could be reduced to a series of such verifications, it would not be a science. A chess-player, for instance, does not create a science by winning a piece. There is no science but the science of the general. It may even be said that the object of the exact sciences is to dispense with these direct verifications." - Henri Poincare

“It is certainly not in general the case that by acquiring a good all-round scientific education you so completely satisfy the innate longing for a religious or philosophical stabilization, in face of the vicissitudes of everyday life, as to feel quite happy without anything more. What does happen often is that science suffices to jeopardize popular religious convictions, but not to replace them by anything else. This produces the grotesque phenomenon of scientifically trained, highly competent minds with an unbelievably childlike-undeveloped or atrophied-philosophical outlook.” Erwin Schrödinger

“We deny the thesis of the absolute finitude of the human being, both in the atheistic form of obdurate finitude and in the theistic form where it serves as the basis for the violent drama of crushing despair, revelation, and mercy. Instead, spirit is freedom in the bondage of existence, it is open to infinity. God as the completed infinite can admittedly not be given to us nor come to be given; God can neither break into t he human through revelation nor can the human by mystic contemplation break through to Him. We can only represent the completed infinite in the symbol. All creative shaping by humans receives its deep holiness and dignity from this connection. Yet up to now it has been only in mathematics and physics, as far as I can see, that the symbolic-theoretical construction has taken on such solidity that it is compelling for everyone whose mind opens itself to these sciences.” Hermann Weyl

"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with." - Ada Lovelace