The Failed Experiment Quotes

“When the last human observer disappears, the questions disappear with the observer. There will be no one left to decide whether the experiment succeeded. No one left to condemn the creator, if there was one. No one left to defend optimism or celebrate pessimism. No one left to maintain money, borders, religions, identities, institutions, or the stories through which human beings explained their lives. There will be no human meaning because there will be no human minds left to produce it.”
― Dain Sica, The Failed Experiment : An Essay on Consciousness, Determinism, Suffering, and the Human Condition

“The most persistent story is the belief that the process is moving toward something.”
― Dain Sica, The Failed Experiment: An Essay on Consciousness, Determinism, Suffering, and the Human Condition

“This is the sense in which consciousness can be understood here as entrapment rather than triumph. The problem is not that awareness has no practical value. It has enormous practical value. It allows human beings to cooperate, communicate, invent, plan, build, remember, and transform their surroundings. The problem is that the same machinery can turn inward without limit. The mind can imagine its own death, then imagine the loss of those it loves, then imagine the future suffering that has not yet occurred, then construct questions about why any of it should happen. The nervous system that protects the organism from immediate danger can become capable of generating suffering in the absence of immediate danger simply because it can represent possibilities.”
― Dain Sica, The Failed Experiment: An Essay on Consciousness, Determinism, Suffering, and the Human Condition

“The most persistent story is the belief that the process is moving toward
something. Human beings are remarkably willing to tolerate the present when
the future is presented as compensation for it. Progress promises that the next
generation will inherit something better. Work promises that effort will
eventually be rewarded. Love promises that attachment will produce
permanence. Religion promises that suffering will be repaid in another
existence. Politics promises that collective action can deliver the society that
does not yet exist. Even pessimism can become another promise when it
imagines that seeing through all these illusions will produce some final state
of liberation.”
― Dain Sica, The Failed Experiment : An Essay on Consciousness, Determinism, Suffering, and the Human Condition