“As an analogy one can imagine an intelligent amoeba with a good memory. As time progresses the amoeba is constantly splitting, each time the resulting amoebas having the same memories as the parent. Our amoeba hence does not have a life line, but a life tree.”

— Hugh Everett

illustrating the branching of individuals in many worlds each time an observation is performed, in an early draft of his doctoral dissertation (1950s). Accessible at Read original documents http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/manyworlds/original.html of Nova's Parallel worlds documentary of Hugh Everett's work.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update March 14, 2025. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "As an analogy one can imagine an intelligent amoeba with a good memory. As time progresses the amoeba is constantly spl…" by Hugh Everett?

Hugh Everett photo

Hugh Everett5

American physicist, author of the many-worlds interpretatio… 1930–1982

Related quotes

“McIlvaine continued, “Take the amoeba—a more basic, and much more successful life form than than ours. The motivational psychology of the amoeba—”
I switched off my ears; free speech gives a man the right to talk about the “psychology” of an amoeba, but I don’t have to listen.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Puppet Masters

Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 19 (p. 104)

“I managed to fail Arts I, a course that a moderately intelligent amoeba could have passed without special coaching.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

I.580
Human, All Too Human (1878)

“What business does memory have with time?”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Source: Beautiful Ruins

“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

“Mirrors reverse life, memories reverse time.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy: Volume 2 (2022)

“I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby — I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor's secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters… "Betrayal"… "Confrontation"… "Management"… My God, you'd need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas.”

Tom Stoppard Night and Day

Milne, Act I
Night and Day (1978)

“Truly happy memories always live on, shining. Over time, one by one, they come back to life.”

Banana Yoshimoto book Kitchen

Source: Kitchen (1988)

“The systems view of nature and man is clearly non- anthropocentric, but it is not non-humanistic for all that. It allows us to understand that man is one species of system in a complex and embracing hierarchy of nature, and at the same time it tells us that all systems have value and intrinsic worth. They are goal-oriented, self-maintaining, and self-creating expressions of nature's penchant for order and adjustment. The status of man is not lessened by admitting the amoeba as his kin, nor by recognizing that sociocultural systems are his supersystems. Seeing himself as a connecting link in a complex natural hierarchy cancels man's anthropocentrism, but seeing the hierarchy itself as an expression of self-ordering and self-creating nature bolsters his self-esteem and encourages his humanism.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 118.

“You are the descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach three and a half billion years ago. You are the blind and arbitrary product of time, chance, and natural forces. You are a mere grab-bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance. You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system in an empty corner of a universe. You are a purely biological entity, different only in degree but not in kind from a microbe, virus, or amoeba. You have no essence beyond your body, and at death you will cease to exist entirely. In short you come from nothing and are going to nowhere.”

Randy Alcorn (1954) American Protestant author

Quoted in Dinesh D'Souza, What's so Great About Christianity (Regnery, 2007), p. 15

Related topics