Quotes

Whenever we state the properties of a body in terms of physical quantities we are imparting knowledge as to the response of various metrical indicators to its presence, and nothing more. After all, knowledge of this kind is fairly comprehensive. A knowledge of the response of all kinds of objects—weighing-machines and other indicators—would determine completely its relation to its environment, leaving only its inner un-get-atable nature un¬determined. In the relativity theory we accept this as full knowledge, the nature of an object in so far as it is ascertainable by scientific inquiry being the abstraction of its relations to all surrounding objects. […]

The recognition that our knowledge of the objects treated in physics consists solely of readings of pointers and other indicators transforms our view of the status of physical knowledge in a fundamental way. Until recently it was taken for granted that we had knowledge of a much more intimate kind of the entities of the external world. Let me give an illustration which takes us to the root of the great problem of the relations of matter and spirit. Take the living human brain endowed with mind and thought. Thought is one of the indisputable facts of the world. I know that I think, with a certainty which I cannot attribute to any of my physical knowledge of the world. More hypothetically, but on fairly plausible evidence, I am convinced that you have minds which think. Here then is a world fact to be investigated. The physicist brings his tools and commences systematic exploration. All that he discovers is a collection of atoms and electrons and fields of force arranged in space and time, apparently similar to those found in inorganic objects. He may trace other physical characteristics, energy, temperature, entropy. None of these is identical with thought. He might set down thought as an illusion-some perverse interpretation of the interplay of the physical entities that he has found. Or if he sees the folly of calling the most undoubted element of our experience an illusion, he will have to face the tremendous question, How can this collection of ordinary atoms be a thinking machine? But what knowledge have we of the nature of atoms which renders it at all incongruous that they should constitute a thinking object? The Victorian physicist felt that he knew just what he was talking about when he used such terms as matter and atoms. Atoms were tiny billiard balls, a crisp statement that was supposed to tell you all about their nature in a way which could never be achieved for transcendental things like consciousness, beauty or humour. But now we realise that science has nothing to say as to the intrinsic nature of the atom. The physical atom is, like everything else in physics, a schedule of pointer readings. The schedule is, we agree, attached to some unknown background. Why not then attach it to something of spiritual nature of which a prominent characteristic is thought. It seems rather silly to prefer to attach it to something of a so-called “concrete” nature inconsistent with thought, and then to wonder where the thought comes from. We have dismissed all preconception as to the background of our pointer readings, and for the most part we can discover nothing as to its nature. But in one case—namely, for the pointer readings of my own brain—I have an insight which is not limited to the evidence of the pointer readings. That insight shows that they are attached to a background of consciousness. Although I may expect that the background of other pointer readings in physics is of a nature continuous with that revealed to me in this particular case, I do not suppose that it always has the more specialised attributes of consciousness. But in regard to my one piece of insight into the background no problem of irreconcilability arises; I have no other knowledge of the background with which to reconcile it. In science we study the linkage of pointer readings with pointer readings. The terms link together in endless cycle with the same inscrutable nature running through the whole. There is nothing to prevent the assemblage of atoms constituting a brain from being of itself a thinking object in virtue of that nature which physics leaves undetermined and undeterminable. If we must embed our schedule of indicator readings in some kind of background, at least let us accept the only hint we have received as to the significance of the background—namely that it has a nature capable of manifesting itself as mental activity.

Arthur Stanley Eddington, The nature of the physical world, Whitefish, MT?, 1929, pp. 257-260

The reason why there are hardly ever completely knock-down arguments, except between very like minded philosophers, is that philosophers, unlike chemists or geologists, are licensed to question everything, including methodology.

J. J. C. Smart, Ockhamist comments on Strawson, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 13, no. 10, 2006, pp. 158–162, pp. 158-159

Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even determinism, says that its real Dame is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom. Even a writer as little used to making capital out of soft words as Mr. Hodgson hesitates not to call himself a “free-will determinist.”

Now, this is all a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of fact has got entirely smothered up. Freedom in all these senses presents simply no problem at all. No matter what the soft determinist mean by it, whether he, mean the acting without external constraint, whether he mean the acting rightly, or whether he mean the acquiescing in the law of the whole, who cannot answer him that sometimes we are free and sometimes we are not? But there is, a problem, an issue of fact and not of words, an issue of the most momentous importance, which is often decided without discussion in one sentence, nay, in one clause of a sentence, by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their efforts to show what “true” freedom is[.]

William James, The dilemma of determinism, Unitarian review and religious magazine, vol. 22, no. 8, 1884, pp. 193–224, pp. 197-198

Whenever you’re trying to discover something about the nature of the world, you can always proceed straight to the point at hand, without having to determine the meaning of some folk expression, by simply introducing some theoretical terms and defining them by stipulation. Thus, for example, if you just want to know what the solar system is like, you can forget about folk terms like ‘planet’ and introduce some new terms with clearly defined meanings. And if you just want to know what human decision-making processes are like, you can simply use terms of art like ‘Humean freedom’ and ‘L-freedom’ and so on and proceed straight to the point at hand, trying to determine which of the various kinds of freedom (or “freedom”) human beings actually possess without first determining the ordinary-language meaning of the folk term ‘free will’. And if you’re in a situation where you already know all the relevant metaphysical facts but don’t know what some folk term means, then you can describe the metaphysical facts using technical terms with stipulated definitions, and so your lack of knowledge of the meaning of the folk term shouldn’t be treated as a genuine ignorance of (nonsemantic) metaphysical facts.

Mark Balaguer, Free will as an open scientific problem, Cambridge, 2010, pp. 34-35

When it comes right down to it, the challenge of mindfulness is to realize that “this is it.” Right now /is /my life.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, New York, 1991, p. 128

When we observe external objects, we observe their structure and function; that’s all. Such observations give no reason to postulate any new class of properties, except insofar as they explain structure and function; so there can be no analogue of a ‘hard problem’ here. Even if further properties of these objects existed, we could have no access to them, as our external access is physically mediated: such properties would lie on the other side of an unbridgeable epistemic divide. Consciousness uniquely escapes these arguments by lying at the centre of our epistemic universe, rather than at a distance. In this case alone, we can have access to something other than structure and function.

David J. Chalmers, Moving forward on the problem of consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 1997, pp. 3–46, p. 6

[F]elt importances are neither propositions nor universals nor Platonic ideals; rather, they are individual and concrete features of the empirically existing world-whole.

Quentin Smith, The felt meanings of the world: a metaphysics of feeling, West Lafayette, 1986, p. 29

The basic presupposition shared by Heidegger and other philosophers in the rational-metaphysical tradition from Plato and Aristotle onwards is that the central metaphysical question is a Why-question, and is about the reason or reasons that explain why everything is and is as it is. Metaphysicians from Plato to Hegel presupposed the most fundamental metaphysical truth to be the answer to this question, and metaphysicians from Schopenhauer onwards presupposed the most basic metaphysical truth to be the unanswerability of this question.

Quentin Smith, The felt meanings of the world: a metaphysics of feeling, West Lafayette, 1986, p. 13

In many areas of dispute between realism and antirealism, realism is the natural metaphysical position. We begin as realists about the external world or the unobservable entities mentioned in well-confirmed scientific theories. Generally, people become antirealists about these things (if they do) because they become convinced that realism is in some way naive and must be abandoned in the face of compelling metaphysical and epistemological objections. So too, I think, in ethics. We begin as (tacit) cognitivists and realists about ethics. Moral claims make assertions, which can be true or false; some people are morally more perceptive than others; and people’s moral views have not only changed over time but have improved in many cases (e.g., as regard slavery). We are led to some form of antirealism (if we are) only because we come to regard the moral realist’s commitments as untenable, say, because of the apparently occult nature of moral facts or because of the apparent lack of a well developed methodology in ethics.

David Owen Brink, Moral realism and the foundations of ethics, Cambridge, 2001, p. 23

General intelligence […] is the best-established, most predictive, most heritable mental trait ever found in psychology. Whether measured with a formal IQ test or assessed through informal conversation, intelligence predicts objective performance and learning ability across all important life-domains that show reliable individual differences.

Glenn Geher and Geoffrey Miller (eds.), Mating intelligence: Sex, relationships, and the mind's reproductive system, New York London, 2008, p. 373

Philosophy, like science, aims to say how things are in reality, and conflict with ordinary thought and language is no more an objection to a philosophical theory than a scientific one.

Galen Strawson, Selves: An essay in revisionary metaphysics, Oxford, 2009, p. 315

Moral ‘interference’ is so unlike political or social interference, e.g., that it is inapprpriate to understand the former as essentially similar to the latter.

Shelly Kagan, The limits of morality, Oxford, 1989, pp. 237-238

[T]he deterministic fallacy is the assumption that genetic influences on our behavior take the form of genetic control of our behavior, which we can do nothing about (short of modifying our genes). The mistake here is assuming or implying that genes influence behavior directly, rather than through the indirect means of working with the environment to build or modify biological structures than then, in interplay with the environment, produce behavior. Some popular books on human evolution have exhibited the deterministic fallacy by implying that one or another form of behavior—such as fighting for territories—is unavoidable because it is controlled by our genes. That implication is unreasonable even when applied to nonhuman animals. Territorial birds, for example, defend territories only when the environmental conditions are ripe for them to do so. We humans can control our environment and thereby control ourselves. We can either enhance or reduce the environmental ingredients needed for a particular behavioral tendency to develop and manifest itself.

Peter Gray, Psychology, New York, 2006, pp. 87-88

Like coastal cities in the third millennium, important areas of human discourse seem threatened by the rise of modem science. The problem isn’t new, of course, or wholly unwelcome. The tide of naturalism has been rising since the seventeenth century, and the rise owes more to clarity than to pollution in the intellectual atmosphere. All the same, the regions under threat are some of the most central in human life–the four Ms, for example: Morality, Modality, Meaning and the Mental. Some of the key issues in contemporary metaphysics concern the place and fate of such concepts in a naturalistic world view.

Huw Price and I-huw Price, Naturalism and the fate of the M-worlds, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, vol. 71, no. 1, 1997, pp. 247–267, pp. Vol

It is plain that Absolutism is the philosophical expression of an aspect of reality which has profoundly impressed some of the greatest thinkers in all parts of the world and at all periods of human history. If the Vedantists, Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel (to mention no others) all talked what appears, when literally interpreted, to be nonsense, it is surely a most significant fact that men of such high intelligence and of such different races and traditions should independently have talked such very similar nonsense. Dr Tennant, in his Philosophical Theology, after quoting a characteristic passage from Jakob Boehme, as characteristically remarks that “the critic does well to call nonsense by its name”. No doubt he does. But he does not do so well if he ignores the problem presented by the concurrence of so much similar nonsense from so many independent and intellectually respectable sources. To me, for one, this fact strongly suggests that there is a genuine and important aspect of reality, which is either ineffable, or, if not, is extremely hard to express coherently in language which was, no doubt, constructed to deal with other aspects of the universe.

C. D. Broad, Examination of McTaggart's philosophy, Cambridge, 1933, pp. li-lii

If a philosophy professor convinces you in a seminar that nobody is in pain and that no physical object is solid, you will forget both the moment you stub your toe on the doorframe as you leave the room.

Daniel Stoljar, Physicalism, London, 2010, pp. 14-15

There is not something or someone experiencing experience! You do not feel feelings, think thoughts, or sense sensations any more than you hear hearing, see sight, or smell smelling. “I feel fine” means that a fine feeling is present. It does not mean that there is one thing called an “I” and another separate thing called a feeling, so that when you bring them together this “I” feels the fine feeling. There are no feelings but present feelings, and whatever feeling is present is “I.” No one ever found an “I” apart from some present experience, or some experience apart from an “I”—which is only to say that the two are the same thing.

Alan W. Watts, Wisdom Of Insecurity : A Message for an Age of Anxiety, S.l., 1951, pp. 85-86

Shortly after Charles Spearman’s key work in 1904, intelligence became the best-studied, best-established trait in psychology. Higher intelligence predicts higher average success in every domain of life: school, work, money, mating, parenting, physical health, and mental health. It predicts avoiding many misfortunes, such as car accidents, jail, drug addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, divorce, and jury duty. It is one of the most sexually attractive traits in every culture studied, for both sexes. It is socially desired in friends, students, mentors, co-workers, bosses, employees, housemates, and especially platoon mates. It remains ideologically controversial because its predictive power is so high, and its distribution across individuals is so unequal.

Geoffrey Miller, Spent: sex, evolution, and consumer behavior, New York, 2009, pp. 144-145

Have you ever experienced a pain so sharp in your heart that it’s all you can do to take a breath? It’s a pain you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy; you wouldn’t want to pass it on to anyone else for fear he or she might not be able to bear it. It’s the pain of being betrayed by the person with whom you’ve fallen in love. It’s not as serious as death, but it feels a whole like it, and as I’ve come to learn, pain is pain any way you slice it.

Chelsea Handler, My horizontal life: A collection of one-night stands, New York, 2005, p. 46

[N]othing impresses me so much about Wittgenstein as the impression which he made on such fine characters and such eminent philosophers as, e.g., Moore and von Wright.

C. D. Broad, Review of Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: a memoir, Universities quarterly, vol. 13, no. 3, 1959, pp. 304–306, p. 304