Dining Philosophers Problem Quotes

Even if all philosophers do eat, some may eat more than others. This situation is called "lack of fairness". Or life. ~ Dennis E. Shasha

In proposing a solution to the problem of the individual and the community, Marx was contributing to a tradition in moral philosophy going back at least to Plato. Plato had argued that personal happiness is to be found in virtuous conduct and in serving one's community. He thus found harmony between the individual's interest in happiness and the needs of the community. But Plato's arguments did not convince later philosophers. ~ Anonymous

Children are intuitive scientists and armchair philosophers, brimming with such startling observations that it's hard to believe they've come from people barely out of diapers. . . . But, along with their Talmudic wisdom and intellectual acuity, preschoolers can surprise, equally, with their undeveloped motor skills, atrocious impulse control, and venal self-interest. Like teenagers, whom they closely resemble developmentally, preschoolers are a complicated mix of competence and ineptitude. The problem with American early education is how often the grownups misread, and even interchange, those two attributes completely, and at such critical moments for learning. ~ Erika Christakis

Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored. ~ Daniel Dennett

You know the difference between right and wrong,' he repeated finally. 'Man, why did you need Initiation - by the Golden Dawn, or by anybody else? You are a genius, a sage, a giant among men. You have solved the problem which philosophers have been debating since antiquity - the mystery about which no two nations or tribes have ever agreed, and no two men or women have ever agreed, and no intelligent person has ever agreed totally with himself from one day to the next. You know the difference between right and wrong. I am overawed. I swoon. I figuratively kiss your feet. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Color is not a trivial subject but one that has compelled, for hundreds of years, a passionate curiosity in the greatest artists, philosophers, and natural scientists. The young Spinoza wrote his first treatise on the rainbow; the young Newton's most joyous discovery was the composition of white light; Goethe's great color work, like Newton's, started with a prism; Schopenhauer, Young, Helmholtz, and Maxwell, in the last century, were all tantalized by the problem of color; and Wittgenstein's last work was his Remarks on Colour. And yet most of us, most of the time, overlook its great mystery. ~ Oliver Sacks

[Philosophers] are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic ... ; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Problem with the big philosophers is they cared about ideas more than people. Hegel would probably have stepped over a guy trying to slit his wrists outside a bar - to get to all the people he could sit and bullshit with inside. Did you know half of philosophy was first put into words by people shot in the ass? ~ Carol Plum-Ucci

So far, we have no good answer to this problem. Already thousands of years ago philosophers realised that there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone other than oneself has a mind. Indeed, even in the case of other humans, we just assume they have consciousness – we cannot know that for certain. Perhaps I am the only being in the entire universe who feels anything, and all other humans and animals are just mindless robots? Perhaps I am dreaming, and everyone I meet is just a character in my dream? Perhaps I am trapped inside a virtual world, and all the beings I see are merely simulations?
According to current scientific dogma, everything I experience is the result of electrical activity in my brain, and it should therefore be theoretically feasible to simulate an entire virtual world that I could not possibly distinguish from the 'real' world. Some brain scientists believe that in the not too distant future, we shall actually do such things. Well, maybe it has already been done – to you? For all you know, the year might be 2216 and you are a bored teenager immersed inside a 'virtual world' game that simulates the primitive and exciting world of the early twenty-first century. Once you acknowledge the mere feasibility of this scenario, mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers. ~ Hans Reichenbach

It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future. ~ A.J. Ayer

If there is ever an amelioration of the condition of mankind, philosophers, theologians, legislators, politicians and moralists will find that the regulation of the press is the most difficult, dangerous and important problem they have to resolve. Mankind cannot now be governed without it, nor at present with it. ~ John Adams

A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells ... and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers. ~ Tony Hoare

Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it's clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn't really philosophical to begin with. ~ Jerry A. Fodor

Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

[T]he problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not a pseudo-problem of armchair philosophers: it has grave ethical and political implications. ~ Imre Lakatos

Suppose cats became philosophers, they would see a cat universe and have a cat solution of the problem of the universe, and a cat ruling it. So we see from this that our explanation of the universe is not the whole of the solution. ~ Swami Vivekananda

What if she were simply to open her bedroom window and throw herself out, head first? Would she really be able to come back and start again? Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was - wasn't everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind? Philosophers "came to grips" with this problem a long time ago, Dr. Kellet had told her, rather wearily, it was one of the very first questions they addressed, so there was really no point in her fretting over it. But surely, by its very nature, everyone wrestled with this dilemma anew every time? ~ Kate Atkinson

There is a whole school of thought that holds bureaucracy tends to expand according to a kind of perverse but inescapable inner logic. The argument runs as follows: if you create a bureaucratic structure to deal with some problem, that structure will invariably end up creating other problems that seem as if they, too, can only be solved by bureaucratic means. In universities, this is sometimes informally referred to as the "creating committees to deal with the problem of too many committees" problem. ~ David Graeber

I've been having problems with the right wing lately. ~ John F. Kerry

And frankly, being a woman I think gives me a slightly different take on a lot of the issues and on a lot of the solutions to the problems we face. ~ Carol Moseley Braun

I think being optimistic is ensuring your success. If you start out saying 'I've got this problem,' or 'I'm angry at that,' you will not succeed. ~ George Takei

Indeed, as Peter Whittle recounts, during World War II efforts to solve the question so sapped the energies and minds of Allied analysts ... that the suggestion was made that the problem be dropped over Germany, as the ultimate instrument of intellectual sabotage. ~ Brian Christian

I've never really had a problem with the imagination level of an audience. They're always smarter and savvier than any studio exec will give them credit for. ~ James Van Der Beek

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge. ~ Paulo Coelho

We need practice solving problems. ~ Bob Gill

The surest way to keep a problem from being solved is to deny that problem exists. Telling people not to complain is a way of keeping social issues from being addressed. It trivializes the grievances of the vulnerable, making the burdened feel like burdens. Telling people not to complain is an act of power, a way of asserting that one's position is more important than another one's pain. People who say "stop complaining" always have the right to stop listening. But those who complain have often been denied the right to speak. ~ Sarah Kendzior

Always a good dodge to simplify your problem by removing it. ~ Henry Miller

He could quite quickly become detached from the nuances of common human emotion. Particularly if he was engaged in some aspect of a scientific problem or research. His work excluded any consideration for the feelings of those around him. And he rarely excused himself or justified his behavior. It was as if he was compelled to focus all his energy on one subject and was unaware that others did not follow his obsession. ~ Theresa Breslin

You might be a redneck if ... Your only condiment on the dining room table is the economy size bottle of ketchup. ~ Jeff Foxworthy

You can't just heely away from your problems forever ~ Barack Obama

In the past, if a homeowner with a mortgage had a problem making the payment, often he'd get together with a lender and strike a deal, because foreclosures are very expensive to the lender and obviously not good for the homeowner and the community. ~ Henry Paulson

The problem is that doctors today often assume that something mysterious and unidentified has gone wrong with labor or that the woman's body is somehow "inadequate" - what I call the "woman's body as a lemon" assumption. For a variety of reasons, a lot of women have also come to believe that nature made a serious mistake with their bodies. This belief has become so strong in many that they give in to pharmaceutical or surgical treatments when patience and recognition of the normality and harmlessness of the situation would make for better health for them and their babies and less surgery and technological intervention in birth. Most women need encouragement and companionship more than they need drugs. ~ Ina May Gaskin

Maybe, it's not the distance that's the problem, but how you handle it. ~ David Levithan

This is the problem with the way you educate your children. You don't want your young ones drawing their own conclusions. You want them to come to the same conclusions that you came to. Thus you doom them to repeat the mistakes to which your own conclusions led you. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

I've always thought of myself as a problem that deserved to stay hidden. Never quite trusted myself, or what I wanted. Before you, I was all right letting everything happen to me. I honestly have never thought I deserved to choose. ~ Casey McQuiston

If you can't solve it, it's not a problem - it's reality. ~ Barbara Coloroso

Life would be so colourful if only I had a drink problem. ~ Steven Morrissey

Do you want a ride home?"
"I rode my bike, and I don't really want to keep it here at the school."
"I have a truck, it won't be a problem to throw it into the bed."
"Well then, I suppose I don't really have an excuse to say no, do I?"
"I was going to hold your duffel hostage until you said yes anyway."
"Now what has my duffel bag ever done to you? ~ August Westman

Humans are a social species more than any other, and in order to build a community, which for some reason humans have to do in order to live, we have to solve the communication problem. Language is the tool that was invented to solve that problem. ~ Daniel Everett

Even the highest compensation is a tiny fraction of the value created by many business and technical innovations. The problem with executive compensation in the United States is not with this idea. The problem is that in many cases the high compensation levels persist even when innovations do not occur and reactions to the innovations of others are slow. ~ William W. Lewis

I don't think there's a problem with dating somebody outside of your race, as long as you're doing it because you want to be with that person. Everybody tells you what you should do when you're dating, but if you follow your heart, it usually works out. ~ Donald Faison

Jane, I don't care what capacity you let me have in your life. I just want to be there. And if that means I have to keep my distance, I'll do that."
I sighed. If ever there was a time for me to lay all my cards on the table, this was it. Naked, wounded, and vulnerable. "So, here's my basic
problem with us, the reason I can't seem to relax into a relationship with you, the reason I find problems where none exist and I push you away. I - I can't figure out why you're with me!" I exclaimed, clapping my hand over my mouth. I hadn't meant for that part to come out. I had meant to say, "You lie and hide things from me."

Gabriel pried my fingers away from my lips. My hands trembled as stuff I'd been feeling for months tumbled from my tongue. "I know that
makes me neurotic and sad, but I can't figure out why you want to be with me. Every other woman in your life is exotic and beautiful and has all this history. And I'm just some drunk girl you followed home from a bar, some pathetic human you felt your usual need to protect, and you got stuck with a lifetime tie to her because she was dumb enough to get shot. I can't stand the idea that you feel obligated to me. I know I'm insecure and pushy and spastic, desperately inappropriate at times and just plain odd at others. And I can't help but wonder why you would want that when there are obviously so many other options. I can't help but feel that I'm keeping you from someone better."
I let out a loud, long ~ Molly Harper

The traffic system needs a complete rethink," mused Bryant as the unit's only allocated vehicle, a powder-blue Vauxhall with a thoroughly thrashed engine, accelerated through Belsize Park. "Look at these road signs. Ministerial graffiti."
"It's no use lecturing on the problem, Arthur. That's why your driving examiner failed you thirty-seven times."
"What makes you such a great driver?'
"I don't hit things. ~ Christopher Fowler

The problem isn't that we have bodies; the problem is that we're not living in them. ~ Geneen Roth

I would like to have as much going on as other people do, but my problem is I get so attached to things, and there's my kids, and I need my sleep, and then there's being married - gotta check in on that, too. ~ Joss Whedon

The unions need to be taken on. British Airways is massively over-staffed and has got to get its costs down ... The problem for [chief executive] Willie Walsh is that the board of BA has no spine, no balls and no vision. ~ Michael O'Leary

The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did not
change for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like she
was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor. At the same
time, she had a flamethrower tongue that she would turn on people at the oddest
times, usually in some grandiose, earth-scorching retaliation for a slight or
breach of etiquette that none of the other freshmen had even perceived. It
wasn't until a number of years later, when they both wound up working at Black
Sun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the equation together. At the
time, both of them were working on avatars. He was working on bodies, she was
working on faces. She was the face department, because nobody thought that
faces were all that important -- they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the
avatars. She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong.
But at this phase, the all-male society of bit-heads that made up the power
structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and
superficial. It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially
virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too
smart to be sexists.
That first impression, back at the age of seventeen, was nothing more than that
-- the gut reaction of a post-adolescent Army brat who had been on his own for
ab ~ Neal Stephenson