“But the nonexistent apples will still fall toward the nonexistent ground at a meaningless rate of 9.8 m/s2.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Quantum Non-Realism http://lesswrong.com/lw/q5/quantum_nonrealism/ (May 2008)
Context: The nature of "reality" is something about which I'm still confused, which leaves open the possibility that there isn't any such thing. But Egan's Law still applies: "It all adds up to normality." Apples didn't stop falling when Einstein disproved Newton's theory of gravity. Sure, when the dust settles, it could turn out that apples don't exist, Earth doesn't exist, reality doesn't exist. But the nonexistent apples will still fall toward the nonexistent ground at a meaningless rate of 9.8 m/s2.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "But the nonexistent apples will still fall toward the nonexistent ground at a meaningless rate of 9.8 m/s2." by Eliezer Yudkowsky?

Eliezer Yudkowsky 56

American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence resea… 1979

Related quotes

“By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Attributed to Kafka in Ambiguous Spaces (2008) by NaJa & deOstos (Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos), p. 7, and a couple other publications since, this is actually from Report to Greco (1965) by Nikos Kazantzakis, p. 434
Misattributed

“It is not that love sometimes makes mistakes, but that it is, essentially, a mistake. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfections on to another person. One day the phantasmagoria vanishes, and with it love dies.”

Samuel R. Delany book The Einstein Intersection

Section 9 (quoted from Ortega y Gasset, “On Love”)
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“I heard the bells from the future churches, the children playing and laughing in the schoolyards … and here was an almond tree in bloom before me: I must reach out and cut a flowering branch. For, by believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired, whatever we have not irrigated with our blood to such a degree that it becomes strong enough to stride across the somber threshold of nonexistence.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Report to Greco

Source: Report to Greco (1965), p. 434; in a few publications since 2008 part of this has been misattributed to Franz Kafka: "By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired."

“When on the ground red apples lie there
in piles like jewels shining
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbines twining”

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) Novelist, poet, writer, activist

from October's Bright Blue Sky

“The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Intercontinental Press (Vol. 3 January-April 1965); also, in Che Guevara speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings (1967)

“When credit is expanding, the rising price level and high profits bring about a high rate of interest. When the expansion has reached, the limit permitted by the stock of gold, the rate of interest is put still higher in order to bring about a fall in the price level. When the fall in prices takes effect, a low rate of interest becomes appropriate, and when credit contraction has proceeded so far that a redundant supply of gold has accumulated, the rate of interest is depressed still lower in order to bring about a renewed rise in the price level. Thus a high rate of interest corresponds first with rising, then with falling, prices, and so synchronizes with high prices. A low rate of interest corresponds first with falling, and then with rising, prices, and so synchronizes with low prices.”

Ralph George Hawtrey (1879–1975) British economist

Ralph George Hawtrey, quoted in Irving Fisher, The Theory of Interest (1930), Chapter 19. The Relation of Interest to Money and Prices

“My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still.
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

" After Apple Picking http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/after-apple-picking-3/"
1910s

“In general, the rate of evaporation (m) of a substance in a high vacuum is related to the pressure (p) of the saturated vapor by the equation m=\sqrt{\frac{M}{2\pi RT}}p. Red phosphorus and some other substances probably form exceptions to this rule.”

Irving Langmuir (1881–1957) American chemist and physicist

Irving Langmuir, "The Constitution and Fundamental Properties of Solids and Liquids. Part I. Solids.", Journal of the American Chemical Society, September 5, 1916

“All and all can only fall with a crushing but meaningless blow.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Gates of Eden

“Just because an apple falls one hundred times out of a hundred does not mean it will fall on the hundred and first.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Death Bringer

“But the nonexistent apples will still fall toward the nonexistent ground at a meaningless rate of 9.8 m/s2.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Eliezer Yudkowsky 56

Related quotes

Related topics