Quotes

The healthy brain theory suggests that our brains are different from those of other apes not because extravagantly large brains helped us to survive or to raise offspring, but because such brains are simply better advertisements of how good our genes are. The more complicated the brain, the easier it is to mess up. The human brain’s great complexity makes it vulnerable to impairment through mutations, and its great size makes it physiologically costly. By producing behaviors such as language and art that only a costly, complex brain could produce, we may be advertising our fitness to potential mates. If sexual selection favored the minds that seemed fit for mating, our creative intelligence could have evolved not because it gives us any survival advantage, but because it makes us especially vulnerable to revealing our mutations in our behaviour.

Geoffrey Miller, The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature, New York, 2001, p. 104

Social drinking until 1947 during a long & terrible love affair, my first infidelity to my wife after 5 years of marriage. My mistress drank heavily & I drank w. her. Guilt, murderous & suicidal. Hallucinations one day walking home. Heard voices. 7 years of psychoanalysis & group therapy in N. Y. Walked up & down drunk on a foot-wide parapet 8 stories high. Passes at women drunk, often successful. Wife left me after 11 yrs of marriage bec. of drinking. Despair, heavy drinking alone, jobless, penniless, in N. Y. Lost when blacked-out the most important professional letter I have ever received. Seduced students drunk. Made homosexual advances drunk, 4 or 5 times. Antabuse once for a few days. Agony on floor after a beer. Quarrel w. landlord drunk at midnight over the key to my apartment, he called police, spent the night in jail, news somehow reached press & radio, forced to resign. Two months of intense self-analysis-dream-interpretations etc. Remarried. My chairman told me I had called up a student drunk at midnight & threatened to kill her. Wife left me bec. of drinking. Gave a public lecture drunk. Drunk in Calcutta, wandered streets lost all night, unable to remember my address. Married present wife 8 yrs ago. Many barbiturates & tranquilizers off & on over last 10 yrs. Many hospitalizations. Many alibis for drinking, lying abt. it. Severe memory-loss, memory distortions. DT’s once in Abbott, lasted hours. Quart of whisky a day for months in Dublin working hard on a long poem. Dry 4 months 2 years ago. Wife hiding bottles, myself hiding bottles. Wet bed drunk in London hotel, manager furious, had to pay for new mattress, $100. Lectured too weak to stand, had to sit. Lectured badly prepared. Too ill to give an examination, colleague gave it. Too ill to lecture one day. Literary work stalled for months. Quart of whiskey a day for months. Wife desperate, threatened to leave unless I stopped. Two doctors drove me to Hazelden last November, 1 week intensive care unit, 4 wks treatment. AA 3 times, bored, made no friends. First drink at Newlbars’ party. Two months’ light drinking, hard biographical work. Suddenly began new poems 9 weeks ago, heavier & heavier drinking more & more, up to a quart a day. Defecated uncontrollably in a University corridor, got home unnoticed. Book finished in outburst of five weeks, most intense work in my whole life exc. maybe first two months of 1953. My wife said St. Mary’s or else. Came here.

John Berryman, Step One, in John Haffenden (ed.) The Life of John Berryman, London, 1982, pp. 374-375

T. S. Eliot, Collected poems 1909 - 1962, New York, 1963, p. 219

We think of certain departures from the principles encapsulated in probability theory, logic, decision theory, and Bayesian confirmation theory as irrational. For example, it is irrational to be more confident of the truth of a conjunction than of one of its conjuncts, and this norm corresponds to the fact that a conjunction cannot be more probable than either of its conjuncts. Should we think of departures from consequentialism principles in the same way?

Frank Jackson, Departing from consequentialism versus departing from decision theory, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 17, no. 1, 1994, pp. 21–21, p. 21

Love is felt so intensely, it seems inconceivable that it will not always produce a response. Love is antiphonal. The words ‘I love you’ contain an implicit demand. They are incomplete without the answer: ‘I love you too.’ Implicit faith in romantic idealism makes us confident that if we proclaim our love loud enough, we will get an answer. As when calling across a valley, we assume that an echo will acknowledge our effort. But love does not obey physical laws. Sometimes we proclaim our love and there is no reply. Our words are killed by the dead acoustic of a cold heart and the ensuing silence is terrible.

Frank Tallis, Love sick: love as a mental illness, New York, 2004, p. 244

Either this is the best of all possible worlds, or God is not omnipotent, not perfectly good, or does not exist.

Stephen Grover, Why only the best is good enough, Analysis, vol. 48, no. 4, 1988, pp. 224–224, p. 224

It can’t possibly be a good idea to assess philosophical theories by the extent to which they preserve everyday intuitions. The trouble is that everyday intuitions are often nothing more than bad old theories in disguise. Any amount of nonsense was once part of common sense, and much nonsense no doubt still is. It was once absolutely obvious that the heavens revolve around the earth each day, that the heart is the seat of the soul, that without religion there can be no morality, that perception involves the reception of sensible forms, and so on. If philosophy had been forced to respect these everyday intuitions, we would still be in the intellectual dark ages.

David Papineau, The tyranny of common sense, The Philosophers' Magazine, no. 34, 2006, pp. 19–25

It is a puzzle how so many people, including intellectuals and academics, devote enormous energy to work in which nothing of themselves or their important goals shines forth, not even in the way their work is presented. If they were struck down, their children upon growing up and examining their work would never know why they had done it, would never know who it was that did it. They work that way and sometimes live that way, too.

Robert Nozick, Philosophical explanations, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981, p. 578

Nature, by whatever mixture of chance and natural necessity, of natural selection and other less predictable evolutionary processes, has given us capacities for theoretical understanding in fundamental physics and higher mathematics that were of no conceivable use (as such) in the adaptive environments in which our hominid line evolved. For similarly unknown reasons it has made us phenomenally conscious experiencers of affective happiness and suffering.

Leonard David Katz, Hedonic reasons as ultimately justifying and the relevance of neuroscience, in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.) Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, Cambridge, MA, 2008, pp. 409–417, p. 416

Now, let us hear another story. A man goes to India, consults a sage in a cave and asks him the meaning of life. In three sentences the sage tells him, the man thanks him and leaves. There are several variants of this story also: In the first, the man lives meaningfully ever after; in the second he makes the sentences public so that everyone then knows the meaning of life; in the third, he sets the sentences to rock music, making his fortune and enabling everyone to whistle the meaning of life; and in the fourth variant, his plane crashes as he is flying off from his meeting with the sage. In the fifth version, the person listening to me tell this story eagerly asks what sentences the sage spoke.

And in the sixth version, I tell him.

Robert Nozick, Philosophical explanations, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981, pp. 573-574

When large regions of one’s data are suspect and for that reason given less credence, even complex curves will tend to look simpler as they are interpolated across such suspect regions. In general, the more error one expects in one’s intuitions (one’s data, in the curve-fitting context), the more one prefers simpler moral principles (one’s curves) that are less context-dependent. This might, but need not, tip the balance of reflective equilibrium so much that we adopt very simple and general moral principles, such as utilitarianism. This might not be appealing, but if we really distrust some broad set of our moral intuitions, this may be the best that we can do.

Robin Hanson, Why health is not special: Errors in evolved bioethics intuitions, Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 19, no. 2, 2002, pp. 153–179, p. 179

We ought […] to take for granted, as first principles, things wherein we fid an universal agreement, among the learned and unlearned, in the different nations and ages of the world. A consent of ages and nations, of the learned and vulgar, ought, at least, to have great authority, unless we can show some prejudice, as universal as the consent is, which might be the cause of it. Truth is one, but error is infinite.

Thomas Reid et al., Essays on the intellectual powers of man, University Park, Pa, 1785, p. 2

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

Oscar wilde and Anton Lesser, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, S.I., 1888

Henry Sidgwick, quoted in Bart Schultz, Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the universe: An intellectual biography, 2004, p. vi

Pablo Neruda, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, Barcelona, 1924

If it were possible to blot entirely out the whole of German metaphysics, the whole of Christian theology, and the whole of the Roman and English systems of technical jurisprudence, and to direct all the minds that expand their faculties in these three pursuits to useful speculation or practice, there would be talent enough set at liberty to change the face of the world.

John Stuart Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, in Francis E. Mineka (ed.) Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1963, p. 652

Though goodness is various, variety is not in itself good.

James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, equality, fraternity, New York, 1873, p. 43

Hoagy Carmichael, I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes), New York, 1939

I am in the situation where people who recognize me and meet me briefly will decide for the rest of their lives what sort of a person I am based on that momentary interaction. People who are really famous must find this paralysing. I try so hard always to be extra-friendly with people, to avoid the awful thought that they may have been left with a poor impression of me. Knowing what famous people are ‘really like’ is an understandable source of fascination: we are all interested to know, regardless of whether or not we have a small amount of fame ourselves. Once, at the start of my career, I hurried into a café in Bristol to look for someone I was due to meet but thought I had missed. As I went through the door, I was looking over the heads of everyone to spot my friend’s ginger hair (I have no problem with that lot) and in my rather flustered state I didn’t notice that a couple, on their way out, had opened the door for me. Unwittingly I had just rushed right past them with my nose in the air. I was only aware when it was too late. I heard a mumbling of my name and a ‘Did you see that? Unbelievable’ as they walked away. That was their experience of meeting Derren Brown, and they went away thinking I was a cunt. And I’m sure they still delight in telling other people when my name comes up, ‘Derren Brown? Yes, met him once. An absolute cunt. Famous for it.’ And I might as well have been. It still makes me cringe. I’m sorry. I hope they read this. The café was the Primrose Café in Bristol. Please read this.

Derren Brown, Tricks of the mind, London, 2009, pp. 204-205

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is referable to what we call evil than we had before. Some day, I doubt not, we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty; but all the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and that is ugly.

Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and ethics and other essays, Charleston, S.C., 1884, p. 80