QUOTATIONS #5

Rebecca Goldstein --: Godel had intended to show that our knowledge of mathematics exceeds our formal proofs. He hadn't meant to subvert the notion that we have objective mathematical knowledge or claim that there is no mathematical proof —quite the contrary. He believed that we do have access to an independent mathematical reality. Our formal systems are incomplete because there's more to mathematical reality than can be contained in any of our formal systems. More precisely, what he showed is that all of our formal systems strong enough for arithmetic are either inconsistent or incomplete. Now an inconsistent system is completely worthless since inconsistent systems allow you to derive contradictions. And once you have a contradiction then you can prove anything at all. ...Godel's [proof] did not see language as constructive of reality. Language rather is subordinate to reality. But that doesn't mean that language isn't important in the proof, that there isn't something fascinating going on in the languages spoken, so to speak, within the proof. In fact, the proof is a layering of different kinds of language, and the way in which the proof links these layers is the essence of the proof's strategy.

George Orwell (1984) --: Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

John G. Cramer --: The concept of knowledge implies stored information, i.e., a memory to store the knowledge, a time sequence before and after the creation of the memory in the mind of the observer, and a flow of information representing a time dependent change in knowledge. Thus the CI (Copenhagen Interpretation) implicitly associates with quantum events a time directionality which, while appropriate to macroscopic observers, is quite alien to and inconsistent with the even-handedness with which microphysics deals with the flow of time. Somehow the thermodynamic irreversibility of the macroscopic observer is intruding into the description of a fully reversible microscopic process.

Jaegwon Kim --: It is clear that we can inductively predict -- in fact, we do this all the time -- the occurrences of conscious states ...but, if the emergentists were right about anything, they were probably right about the phenomenal properties of conscious experience: these properties appear not to be theoretically predictable on the basis of a complete knowledge of the neurophysiology of the brain. This is reflected in the following apparent difference between phenomenal properties and other mental properties (including cognitive/intentional properties): We can imagine designing and constructing novel physical systems that will instantiate certain cognitive capacities and functions (e.g., perception, information processing, inference and reasoning, and using information to guide behavior) -- arguably, we have already designed and fabricated such devices in robots and other computer-driven mechanisms. But it is difficult to imagine our designing novel devices and structures that will have phenomenal experiences; I don't think we have any idea where to begin. The only way we can hope to manufacture a mechanism with phenomenal consciousness is to produce an appropriate physical duplicate of a system that is known to be conscious. Notice that this involves inductive prediction, whereas theoretical prediction is what is needed to design new physical devices with consciousness. The emergentists were wrong in thinking that sundry chemical and biological properties were emergent; but this was an understandable mistake given the state of the sciences before the advent of solid-state physics and molecular biology. The interest of the ideas underlying the emergentist's distinction between the two kinds of properties need not be diminished by the choice of wrong examples.

H. H. Price --: When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato that I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is any material thing there at all. Perhaps what I took for a tomato was really a reflection; perhaps I am even the victim of some hallucination. One thing however I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape, standing out from a background of other colour-patches, and having a certain visual depth, and that this whole field of colour is directly present to my consciousness.

Leopold Stubenberg --: Price's red, bulgy patch is a characteristic example of an element given in experience. Empiricism --the doctrine that all our concepts and all our knowledge are grounded in experience-- assigns a central role to the given. The idea to identify the neutral elements with the elements given in experience therefore naturally suggests itself to a neutral monist under the sway of empiricism. Their realism leads the mainstream neutral monists to construe the given elements of experience as mind-independent entities. The idealistic view that for these items to be is to be perceived is rejected as fallacious. There is nothing intrinsically mental about Price's red patch, nor does the existence of this red patch depend on Price's awareness of it. The patch can exist prior to Price's awareness of it, and it can continue to exist after Price's attention has lapsed. Thus the elements given to us in experience are credited with an autonomous existence. Price's red patch --realistically construed-- is one of the neutral elements forming ultimate reality. According to the mainstream version of neutral monism mind and matter are constructs out of just such entities. This is how the joint operation of the empiricism and the realism that shape mainstream neutral monism gives rise to its most characteristic claim: that the neutral elements of being are given to us in experience.

Lloyd Morgan says this --: The concept of emergence was dealt with (to go no further back) by J.S. Mill ... The word 'emergent', as contrasted with 'resultant', was suggested by G.H. Lewes ... Both adduce examples from chemistry and from physiology; both deal with properties; both distinguish those properties (a) which are additive and subtractive only, and predictable, from those (b) which are new and unpredictable.

Jaegwon Kim --: Resultant properties are to be those that are predictable from a system's total microstructural property, but emergent properties are those that are not so predictable. Morgan's (b) above introduces the idea of "newness", or "novelty", an idea often invoked by the emergentists. Is he using "new" and "unpredictable" here as expressing more or less the same idea, or is he implying, or at least hinting, that emergent properties are unpredictable because they are new and novel properties? I believe that "new" as used by the emergentists has two dimensions: an emergent property is new because it is unpredictable, and this is its epistemological sense; and, second, it has a metaphysical sense, namely that an emergent property brings with it new causal powers, powers that did not exist before its emergence.

transcript --: Physicist: If you take this block of 4-D space/time literally, it means you have to abandon free will. It means not only is the future pre-ordained, but it's already there, it's already happened. There's no point in making any decisions, whatever you do has already happened. If I choose to drop this stone into a pond, I think of it being my own free choice, but of course in 4-D space/time I had no choice in dropping the stone; the splash is already there in the future and so we lose all free will. If time travel was possible, you can imagine people coming back from the future to visit us; it's no good us saying, "you can't exist - you haven't happened yet". They've come from a time which they consider to be their 'now' and for them we're in their path.

Roger Penrose: So this means that in a sense, the present past and future are out there, and that also gives us a very deterministic view of the world. We have no control of what happens in the future because its all laid out. I think the trouble that people have with this idea is that you think the future is under your control, to some degree, and so this means that if the future's laid out then in a sense its not under your control.

Physicist: Personally I'm very uncomfortable about the block universe idea. Now this may be just a gut feeling or just irrational, but I can't accept the future's already 'out there'. I don't accept that I don't have any free will.

Henri Poincare --: [A] reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility. A world as exterior as that, even if it existed, would for us be forever inaccessible. But what we call objective reality is, in the last analysis, what is common to many thinking beings, and could be common to us all; this common part, we shall see, can only be the harmony expressed by mathematical laws. It is this harmony then which is the sole objective reality, the only truth we can obtain.

David Hume --: ...'tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically different from [our perceptions]. Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible: Let us chase our imaginations to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass.

Ralph Barton Perry --: If pure experience is indeed neutral, then it is capable of being actual in the absence of that peculiar modification of itself which constitutes consciousness. But James frequently writes as though experience and conscious experience were the same thing; it is regrettable that James was not more persistently and stubbornly consistent in this own radicalism. If experience is to have the physical and metaphysical scope which he attributed to it, it must be boldly emancipated from all conscious or mental implications.

David Hume --: "Mankind are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement."

Ernst Mach --: Thus the great gulf between physical and psychological research persists only when we acquiesce in our habitual stereotyped conceptions. A color is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colors, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth. When we consider, however, its dependence upon the retina --it is a psychological object, a sensation. Not the subject matter, but the direction of investigation, is different in the two domains.

transcript --: Roger Penrose: I think there is a positive side to this picture of space and time being laid out there as 4 dimensions, because it tells you that all times are there once and it can affect the way one thinks about people who have died. I mean, I remember thinking in this kind of way when my mother died. In some sense she was still there because her existence is still out there in space/time although in our time she is not alive. A colleague of mine had a son who died in tragic circumstances and I presented this idea to him and it helped his understanding also. This was before I heard that Einstein had a colleague died and he wrote to the man's wife that Bessa was still out there, and that somehow this was reassuring. I certainly think this way often, that space/time is laid out and that things in the past and things in the future are out there still.

Narrator: But almost at the same time that Relativity was gaining universal acceptance a radically different picture of the universe was emerging.

Physicist: The way out if you don't want to accept the block universe idea is quantum mechanics. Now, Quantum Mechanics is the second great discovery of the 20th century physics and that states that the future isn't predetermined and preordained.

Alfred N. Whitehead --: The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Albert Einstein --: [The scientist] therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist insofar as he seeks to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; as idealist insofar as he looks upon the concepts and theories as the free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist insofar as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as Platonist or Pythagorean insofar as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensable and effective tool of his research.

Jacques Maritain --: One of the inconsistencies of the Kantian doctrine has often been noted: Kantian Reason was the ordinary human reason present in each individual human being, and at the same time it belonged to that intelligible world which Kant conceived as above time and space, and endowed with a universality dominating the empirical world. Draped in its capital letter like the other personified Abstractions the eighteenth century used so extensively, it was there like a supra-personal Power lodged in the Absolute. Hegelian "Thought" is Kantian "Reason" decidedly deified. Hence the supreme ambiguity that characterizes it. It retains the properties of human reason; it deals with universal notions and lives on their multiplicity; it unites and divides concepts and ideas; it is discursive, advances by reasoning, is subject to logical becoming. And at the same time it is absolute Thought: human reason emancipated from itself as finite and set up as divine Reason, as noesis noeseos, as "the Idea that thinks itself" and in thinking itself engenders in itself the phases of a discourse which is reality.

Richard Rorty --: Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word "true" or "good," supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of "number." They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven't. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call "philosophy"-a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that "there is no such thing" as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a "relativistic" or "subjectivist" theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere.

Piero Scaruffi --: The substance of the brain and the substance of consciousness are the same. Brain processes and thoughts arise from different properties of the same matter, just like a piece of matter exhibits both gravitational and electric features. The feature that gives rise to consciousness is therefore present in every particle of the universe, just like the features that give rise to electricity and gravity. What we call "mind" is actually two things, which must be carefully kept separate: "cognition" (i.e., the faculties of remembering, learning, reasoning, etc.) and consciousness. Cognitive faculties do not require consciousness. Cognition and consciousness are related only because we have not explained them yet. Cognition is a feature of all matter, whether living or not: degrees of remembering, learning, etc. are ubiquitous in all natural systems. They can be explained without revolutionizing Science. The "emotions" associated with them belong instead to consciousness, just like the emotions of tasting or pleasure. The explanation of consciousness does require a conceptual revolution in Science, specifically the introduction of a new feature of matter, which must be present even in the most fundamental building blocks of the universe. Biology and Physics offer us completely different theories of Nature. Physics' view is "reductionist": the universe is made of galaxies, which are made of stars which are made of particles. By studying the forces that operate on particles, one can understand the universe. Biology's view is Darwinist: systems evolve. Consciousness, like all living phenomena, can be more easily explained in the framework of Biology than in the framework of Physics. Reconciling the two views is the great scientific challenge of the next century.

Paul Churchland --: Consider the possibility that for any level of order discovered in the universe, there always exists a deeper taxonomy of kinds and a deeper level of order in terms of which the lawful order can be explained. It is, as far as I can see, a wholly empirical question whether or not the universe is like this, like an "explanatory onion" with an infinite number of explanatory skins. If it is like this, then there are no basic or ultimate laws to which all investigations must inevitably lead.

Julian Barbour --: Physics is an attempt to create a picture of reality as we should see it if we could, somehow, step outside of ourselves.

Julian Baggini --: The phrase "man is the measure of all things" looks like the zenith of arrogance. Are we really so important that everything that exists has to be measured against our scales, our values and our judgment? But this is not the only way to understand our roles as the cosmic measurers. Rather than assuming importance for humanity, we should instead start by accepting our helplessness. We are the measure of all things simply because we are unable to access any better yardstick. We do not have access to the mind of the deity and nor can we adopt a god's eye view for ourselves. We are condemned to see the world only from a human perspective. Man is not therefore the measure of all things because of arrogance, but because there is no alternative. Even the religious should agree. For when they decide a religion offers the true guide to life, it is the overgrown chimpanzee, not God, who has to choose that it is the right road to follow.

Julian Baggini --: If we think religious beliefs are to be explained as neurological disturbances, evolutionary mechanisms, or artefacts of nature, then the theories of Dennett and other naturalists are no exception. That's why a natural approach to the study of religion cannot prove it to be false: you have to do more than explain something in order to explain it away.

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