“It’s a big coincidence. It’s something we can’t explain. But as far as we know that’s all it is. And if it isn’t, we’ll only find out by discovering more facts, not speculating, no matter how logical that speculation might seem. The way to learn the world is to look at the world.”
Source: Learning the World (2005), Chapter 9 “Red Sun Circle” (p. 148)
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Ken MacLeod 25
Scottish science fiction writer 1954Related quotes

“Maybe we should gather a few more facts before wasting our time speculating.”
Source: Ring (1994), Chapter 30 (p. 852)

“I say, let’s learn more and then speculate.”
Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Chapter 12 (p. 122).

“The only thing I do know for sure is that if we both want to, we’ll find a way to make it work.”
Source: The Longest Ride
Source: Mohd Shukri Abdull (2019) cited in " Whoever is involved in RM90m claim will be called - MACC https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/463574" on Malaysia Kini, 11 February 2019.

Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Context: A view of the constitution of matter which recommended itself to Faraday as preferable to the one ordinarily held appears to me to be exactly the view I endeavor to picture as the constitution of spiritual beings. Centers of intellect, will, energy, and power, each mutually penetrable, while at the same time permeating what we call space, but each center retaining its own individuality, persistence of self, and memory. Whether these intelligent centers of the various spiritual forces which in their aggregate go to make up man's character or karma are also associated in any way with the forms of energy which, centered, form the material atom — whether these spiritual entities are material, not in the crude, gross sense of Lucretius, but material as sublimated through the piercing intellect of Faraday — is one of those mysteries which to us mortals will perhaps ever remain an unsolved problem. My next speculation is more difficult, and is addressed to those who not only take too terrestrial a view, but who deny the plausibility — nay, the possibility — of the existence of an unseen world at all. I reply we are demonstrably standing on the brink, at any rate, of one unseen world. I do not here speak of a spiritual or immaterial world. I speak of the world of the infinitely little, which must be still called a material world, although matter as therein existing or perceptible is something which our limited faculties do not enable us to conceive. It is the world — I do not say of molecular forces as opposed to molar, but of forces whose action lies mainly outside the limit of human perception, as opposed to forces evident to the gross perception of human organisms. I hardly know how to make clear to myself or to you the difference in the apparent laws of the universe which would follow upon a mere difference of bulk in the observer. Such an observer I must needs imagine as best I can.

Source: The Book of Nothing (2009), chapter nought "Nothingology—Flying to Nowhere"