78 ideas
| 2956 | There is nothing so obvious that a philosopher cannot be found to deny it [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: There is nothing so obvious that a philosopher cannot be found to deny it. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.73) | |
| A reaction: [Idea of Varro] Just as unreliable witnesses are the bane of a murder enquiry, so bad philosophers throw a cloud of obscurity roundphilosophy. If 9999 people thought 2+2=4, but there is always one who thinks something different. |
| 2963 | There may only be necessary and sufficient conditions (and counterfactuals) because we intervene in the world [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps notions of necessary and sufficient conditions, and counterfactual considerations, are in some way grounded in awareness of ourselves as active interveners and experimenters in the world, not passive spectators. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.155) |
| 2958 | No one has ever succeeded in producing an acceptable non-trivial analysis of anything [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: I cannot think of a single philosophically interesting concept that has been successfully and nontrivially analysed to most people's satisfaction. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.121) |
| 5728 | The concept of truth was originated by the senses [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: The concept of truth was originated by the senses. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], IV.479) | |
| A reaction: This is a refreshing challenge to the modern view of truth, which seems entirely entangled with language. Truth seems a useful concept when discussing the workings of an animal mind. As you get closer to an object, you see it more 'truly'. |
| 2959 | If something is described in two different ways, is that two facts, or one fact presented in two ways? [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Do the statements 'Sir Percy Blakeney is in Paris' and 'The Scarlet Pimpernel is in Paris' express different facts, or the same fact under different modes of presentation? | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.129) |
| 2969 | How does a direct realist distinguish a building from Buckingham Palace? [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: It is one thing to see a building, and another to see it as a building, and yet another to see it as Buckingham Palace. How does the commonsense realist think that this is accomplished? | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.302) |
| 13076 | Scholastics treat relations as two separate predicates of the relata [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: The scholastics treated it as a step in the right explanatory direction to analyze a relational statement of the form 'aRb' into two subject-predicate statements, attributing different relational predicates to a and to b. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 2.2.1) | |
| A reaction: The only alternative seems to be Russell's view of relations as pure universals, having a life of their own, quite apart from their relata. Or you could take them as properties of space, time (and powers?), external to the relata? |
| 13102 | If you individuate things by their origin, you still have to individuate the origins themselves [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: If we go for the necessity-of-origins view, A and B are different if the origin of A is different from the origin of B. But one is left with the further question 'When is the origin of A distinct from the origin of B?' | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.4.1) | |
| A reaction: There may be an answer to this, in a regress of origins that support one another, but in the end the objection is obviously good. You can't begin to refer to an 'origin' if you can't identify anything in the first place. |
| 13103 | Numerical difference is a symmetrical notion, unlike proper individuation [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Scholastics distinguished criteria of numerical difference from questions of individuation proper, since numerical difference is a symmetrical notion. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.4.1) | |
| A reaction: This apparently old-fashioned point appears to be conclusively correct. Modern thinkers, though, aren't comfortable with proper individuation, because they don't believe in concepts like 'essence' and 'substance' that are needed for the job. |
| 13104 | Haecceity as property, or as colourless thisness, or as singleton set [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: There is a contemporary property construal of haecceities, ...and a Scotistic construal as primitive, 'colourless' thisnesses which, unlike singleton-set haecceities, are aimed to do some explanatory work. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.4.4) | |
| A reaction: [He associates the contemporary account with David Kaplan] I suppose I would say that individuation is done by properties, but not by some single property, so I take it that I don't believe in haecceities at all. What individuates a haecceity? |
| 13100 | Maybe 'substance' is more of a mass-noun than a count-noun [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: We could think of 'substance' on the model of a mass noun, rather than a count noun. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.3) | |
| A reaction: They offer this to help Leibniz out of a mess, but I think he would be appalled. The proposal seems close to 'prime matter' in Aristotle, which never quite does the job required of it. The idea is nice, though, and should be taken seriously. |
| 13068 | We can ask for the nature of substance, about type of substance, and about individual substances [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: In the 'blueprint' approach to substance, we confront at least three questions: What is it for a thing to be an individual substance? What is it for a thing to be the kind of substance that it is? What is it to be that very individual substance? | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.1.1) | |
| A reaction: My working view is that the answer to the first question is that substance is essence, that the second question is overrated and parasitic on the third, and that the third is the key question, and also reduces to essence. |
| 13069 | The general assumption is that substances cannot possibly be non-substances [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: There is a widespread assumption, now and in the past, that substances are essentially substances: nothing is actually a substance but possibly a non-substance. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.1.2) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me that they clearly mean, in this context, that substances are 'necessarily' substances, not that they are 'essentially' substances. I would just say that substances are essences, and leave the necessity question open. |
| 13072 | Modern essences are sets of essential predicate-functions [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: The modern view of essence is that the essence of a particular thing is given by the set of predicate-functions essential to it, and the essence of any kind is given by the set of predicate-functions essential to every possible member of that kind. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.2.2) | |
| A reaction: Thus the modern view has elided the meanings of 'essential' and 'necessary' when talking of properties. They are said to be 'functions' from possible worlds to individuals. The old view (and mine) demands real essences, not necessary properties. |
| 17080 | Modern essentialists express essence as functions from worlds to extensions for predicates [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: The modern essentialist gives the same metaphysical treatment to every grammatical predicate - by associating a function from worlds to extensions for each. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: I take this to mean that essentialism is the view that if some predicate attaches to an object then that predicate is essential if there is an extension of that predicate in all possible worlds. In English, essential predicates are necessary predicates. |
| 13101 | Necessity-of-origin won't distinguish ex nihilo creations, or things sharing an origin [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: A necessity-of-origins approach cannot work to distinguish things that come into being genuinely ex nihilo, and cannot work to distinguish things sharing a single origin. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 7.4.1) | |
| A reaction: Since I am deeply suspicious of essentiality or necessity of origin (and they are not, I presume, the same thing) I like these two. Twins have always bothered me with the second case (where order of birth seems irrelevant). |
| 13081 | Even extreme modal realists might allow transworld identity for abstract objects [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: It might be suggested that even the extreme modal realist can countenance transworld identity for abstract objects. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 3.2.2 n46) | |
| A reaction: This may sound right for uncontroversial or well-defined abstracta such as numbers and circles, but even 'or' is ambiguous, and heaven knows what the transworld identity of 'democracy' is! |
| 2970 | Dogs seem to have beliefs, and beliefs require concepts [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Dogs surely have beliefs, and beliefs call for some concepts or other. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.312) |
| 2961 | Empiricism is a theory of meaning as well as of knowledge [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Empiricism is not just a theory of knowledge; it is also a theory meaning. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.149) |
| 5729 | If the senses are deceptive, reason, which rests on them, is even worse [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: The structure of your reasoning must be rickety and defective, if the senses on which it rests are themselves deceptive. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], IV.518) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as one of the most basic tenets of empiricism. It denies the existence of 'pure' reason, and instead asserts that it is built out of complex and abstracted sense experience, which makes it ultimately a second-class citizen. |
| 5702 | The senses are much the best way to distinguish true from false [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: What can be a surer guide to the distinction of true from false than our own senses? | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.700) | |
| A reaction: This doesn't say they are the only guide, which leaves room for guides such as what is consistent or self-evident or inferred. There is enough here, though, to show that the Epicureans were empiricists in a fairly modern way. |
| 2960 | Commonsense realism must account for the similarity of genuine perceptions and known illusions [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Commonsense realism has to account for the subjective similarity of the genuine perception of a green surface and the experience of, say, an after-image. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.142) |
| 5697 | The only possible standard for settling doubts is the foundation of the senses [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: If a belief resting directly on the foundation of the senses is not valid, there will be no standard to which we can refer any doubt on obscure questions for rational confirmation. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.422) | |
| A reaction: A classic statement of empiricist foundationalism. The Epicureans don't appear to have any time for a priori truths at all. I wonder if they settled mathematical disputes by counting objects and drawing diagrams? |
| 5727 | Most supposed delusions of the senses are really misinterpretations by the mind [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Paradoxical experiences (such a dreams and illusions) cannot shake our faith in the senses. Most of the illusion is due to the mental assumptions we ourselves superimpose, so that things not perceived by the senses pass for perceptions. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], IV.462) | |
| A reaction: Some misinterpretations of the senses, such as thinking a square tower round, are the result of foolish lack of judgement, but actual delusions within the senses, such as a ringing in the ears, or a pain in a amputated leg, seem like real sense failures. |
| 5714 | Even simple facts are hard to believe at first hearing [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: No fact is so simple that it is not harder to believe than to doubt at the first presentation. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], II.1022) | |
| A reaction: Hence induction is just 'drumming it in' until you come to believe it. There are good evolutionary reasons why we should be like this, because we would otherwise believe all sorts of silly half-perceptions in the gloaming. |
| 13071 | We can go beyond mere causal explanations if we believe in an 'order of being' [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher comfortable with an 'order of being' has richer resources to make sense of the 'in virtue of' relation than that provided only by causal relations between states of affairs, positing in addition other sorts of explanatory relationships. | |
| From: Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.1.2) | |
| A reaction: This might best be characterised as 'ontological dependence', and could be seen as a non-causal but fundamental explanatory relationship, and not one that has to depend on a theistic world view. |
| 5718 | The mind is in the middle of the breast, because there we experience fear and joy [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: The guiding principle of the whole body is the mind or intellect, which is firmly lodged in the mid-region of the breast. Here is felt fear and alarm, and the caressing pulse of joy. Here, then is the seat of the intellect and mind. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], III.140) | |
| A reaction: Even by this date thinking people were not clear that the mind is in the brain. They paid insufficient attention to head injuries. The emotions are felt to have a location, but intellect and principles are not. |
| 5717 | The mind is a part of a man, just like a hand or an eye [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: First, I maintain that the mind, which we often call the intellect, the seat of guidance and control of life, is part of a man, no less than hand or foot or eyes are parts of a whole living creature. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], III.95) | |
| A reaction: Presumably Lucretius asserts this because some people were denying it. Sounds like common sense to me. The only reason I can see for anyone denying what he says is if they are desperate to survive death. |
| 21387 | The separate elements and capacities of a mind cannot be distinguished [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: No single element [of the soul] can be separated, nor can their capacities be divided spatially; they are like the multiple powers of a single body | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], III.262), quoted by A.A. Long - Hellenistic Philosophy 2.7 | |
| A reaction: It is interesting that this comes from someone with a strongly physicalist view of the mind (though not, if I recall, focusing on the brain). He is still totally impressed by the unified phenomenology of mental experience. He is an empiricist. |
| 2952 | A 1988 estimate gave the brain 3 x 10-to-the-14 synaptic junctions [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: It is estimated by Gierer (1988) that the human cerebral cortex alone contains about 300,000,000,000,000 synaptic junctions. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.46) | |
| A reaction: As we grasp the vastness of this number, and the fact that the junctions are all active, the idea that a brain does something astonishing is not quite so surprising. |
| 2964 | How come unconscious states also cause behaviour? [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Anyone who thinks phenomenal qualities are inseparable from our awareness of them, must think subconscious mental states are totally devoid of phenomenal qualities! So how can these states cause behaviour in the way conscious states do? | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.166) | |
| A reaction: I agree with this thought, though it is beautifully unprovable. We would need to respond to a red traffic light, without having consciously registered its presence. It is is just increasingly clear that we register information pre-consciously. |
| 2951 | Could there be unconscious beliefs and desires? [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: I cannot make intuitive sense of there existing a being who possessed genuine beliefs and desires, but who, or which, lacked the capacity for consciousness altogether. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.44) | |
| A reaction: This is part of the recent move (which strikes me as correct) to see qualia and intentionality as inseparable. We might well, though, need to adopt the 'intentional stance' to a sophisticated robot. But am I aware of all of my beliefs? |
| 2953 | Fish may operate by blindsight [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: If one asks 'what does the world look like to a fish?' the answer may be 'it doesn't look like anything; fish find their way about by blindsight.' | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.56) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as a real possibility, not just a wild speculation. It seems pretty obvious to me that I operate by blindsight in many aspects of my behaviour. Piano-playing would be impossible if all qualia had to be processed. |
| 2967 | We might even learn some fundamental physics from introspection [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: I am suggesting that introspective psychology might have a contribution to make to fundamental physics. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.176) | |
| A reaction: I'm a fan of introspection, as a source of genuine information. |
| 5709 | The actions of the mind are not determinate and passive, because atoms can swerve [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: The fact that the mind itself has no internal necessity to determine its every act and compel it to suffer in helpless passivity - this is due to the slight swerve of the atoms at no determinate time or place. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], II.294) | |
| A reaction: No one likes this proposal much, but it is very intriguing. The Epicureans had seen a problem, one which doesn't bother me much. If, nowadays, you are a reductive physicalist who believes in free will, you have a philosophical nightmare ahead of you. |
| 5695 | Only bodies can touch one another [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Nothing can touch or be touched except body. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.303) | |
| A reaction: This is the key objection to interactionism, and the main reason why the atomists have a thoroughly material view of the mind. It is an induction from a very large number of instances, but the argument is not, of course, conclusive. |
| 5711 | The earth is and always has been an insentient being [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: The earth is and always has been an insentient being. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], II.658) | |
| A reaction: The fact that Epicurus needs to deny this shows that some idea close to panpsychism must still have been around in his time. He is discussing gods at the time, so maybe pantheism was the view being attacked, but that is a subset of panpsychism. |
| 5712 | Particles may have sensation, but eggs turning into chicks suggests otherwise [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: There is the possibility that particles have senses like those of an animate being as a whole, …but from the fact that we perceive eggs turning into live fledglings, we may infer that sense can be generated from the insentient. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], II.914) | |
| A reaction: He gives other arguments for his view. The egg example is not a strong argument, but is precisely our puzzle of how consciousness can emerge from the process of evolution, and natural selection makes dualism look unlikely. |
| 2966 | Can phenomenal qualities exist unsensed? [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Halting the slide into panpsychism is the major advantage of holding that phenomenal qualities can exist unsensed. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.170) | |
| A reaction: Presumably unsensed phenomenal qualities would explain the discovery that we seem to make decisions before we are conscious of what we intend to do. That result certainly implied that consciousness had no real function. |
| 2955 | If mental events occur in time, then relativity says they are in space [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: If we assume that mental events are located in time, then it follows immediately, given special relativity, that they are also in space. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.73) | |
| A reaction: A powerful point. Of course, there might (you never know) be something which exists in time but not space (and thoughts clearly exist in time), but (as in Hume's argument against miracles), dualism will overthrow your other basic beliefs about nature. |
| 2950 | Only logical positivists ever believed behaviourism [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Philosophical behaviourism is an absurd theory. Practically the only philosophers who ever held it, at any rate in its crude form, were certain logical positivists. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.25) | |
| A reaction: I presume Lockwood's target here is eliminativist behaviourism, as opposed to methodological behaviourism (which is a reasonable practice to adopt), and 'black box' behaviourism (which has been superseded by functionalism). |
| 5719 | The mind moves limbs, wakes the body up, changes facial expressions, which involve touch [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Mind and spirit are both composed of matter, as we see them propelling limbs, rousing the body from sleep, changing the expression of the face, and guiding the whole man - activities which clearly involves touch, which involves matter. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], III.164) | |
| A reaction: This is the inverse of Descartes' interaction problem, and strikes me as a straightforward common sense truth. However, if you believe in spiritual gods, this gives you a model for the interaction (however mysterious) of matter and spirit. |
| 5724 | Lions, foxes and deer have distinct characters because their minds share in their bodies [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Why are lions ferocious, foxes crafty, and deer timid? It can only be because the mind always shares in the specific growth of the body according to its seed and breed. If it were immortal and reincarnated, living things would have jumbled characters. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], III.743) | |
| A reaction: A nice argument which I have not encountered in modern times. Of course, even Descartes admits that the mind is intermingled with the body, but it seems that the essential character of a mind is dictated by the body. |
| 5713 | You needn't be made of laughing particles to laugh, so why not sensation from senseless seeds? [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: One can laugh without being composed of laughing particles, ..so why cannot the things that we see gifted with sensation be compounded of seeds that are wholly senseless? | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], II.988) | |
| A reaction: Lovely argument! You might feel driven to panpsychism in your desperation to explain the 'weirdness' of consciousness, but it would be mad to attribute laughter to basic matter, so comedy has to 'emerge' at some point. |
| 2954 | Identity theory likes the identity of lightning and electrical discharges [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: A favourite example of identity theorists is the identification of flashes of lightning with electrical discharges. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.71) | |
| A reaction: Personally I prefer the analogy of the mind being like a waterfall - a non-mysterious physical process which has dramatic properties of its own. If minds must keep busy in order to be minds, they must be processes. |
| 16362 | An identity statement aims at getting the hearer to merge two mental files [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: The purpose of an identity statement is to get the hearer to merge these files or bodies of information into one. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Identity and Reference [1971], p.209), quoted by François Recanati - Mental Files 4.1 | |
| A reaction: Lockwood is a pioneer, in seeing 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' and 'Scott is the author of 'Waverley'' in terms of how the mind works. Mental files seem to me to explain a huge amount. Recanati proposes 'linking' rather than 'merging'. |
| 2971 | Perhaps logical positivism showed that there is no dividing line between science and metaphysics [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: If the logical positivists established anything it is that there is no way of demarcating science from metaphysics. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.313) | |
| A reaction: So many problems arise for philosophers because of the passion for 'demarcating' things. Close study, experiments, statistics and measurements occur in every walk of life. |
| 6611 | One man's meat is another man's poison [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: What is food to one may be literally poison to others. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], IV.638) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the origin of the well-known saying. This is not relativism of perception, but a relativism of how individuals actually respond to the world. It sums up the position with, say, the operas of Wagner. |
| 5730 | Our bodies weren't created to be used; on the contrary, their creation makes a use possible [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Nothing in our bodies was born in order that we might be able to use it, but the thing born creates the use. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], IV.834) | |
| A reaction: This remark (strongly opposed to Aristotle's view of human function and nature) raises the obvious question of why the body is so very useful for staying alive. Most of its uses are not random. Lucretius would abandon this view if he read Darwin. |
| 5726 | The dead are no different from those who were never born [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: One who no longer is cannot suffer, or differ in any way from one who has never been born. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], III.867) | |
| A reaction: There is a special kind of pain in being poor if you were once rich, which is not suffered by those who experience only poverty. Lucretius is right, but we are concerned with how we feel now, not with how we won't feel once dead. |
| 5705 | Nature only wants two things: freedom from pain, and pleasure [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Nature only clamours for two things, a body free from pain, a mind released from worry and fear for the enjoyment of pleasurable sensation. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], II.21) | |
| A reaction: I can't help agreeing with those (like Aristotle) who consider this a very demeaning view of human life. See Idea 99. Bentham agrees with Lucretius (Idea 3777). I think they are largely right, but not entirely. Other motives are possible than sensations. |
| 4054 | I may exist before I become a person, just as I exist before I become an adult [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: It makes perfectly good sense to say that I existed before I became a person, just as I existed before I became an adult, or a philosopher. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (When Does a Life Begin? [1985], p.13) | |
| A reaction: The word 'I' needs thought here. I was once a non-adult, but was I ever a non-person? 'Person' is not a clear concept, despite what many philosophers since Locke may think. |
| 4056 | If the soul is held to leave the body at brain-death, it should arrive at the time of brain-creation [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Any Christian who feels that body and soul go their separate ways at brain death ought in consistency to hold that they come together only at the point when whatever is destroyed at brain death first came into being. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (When Does a Life Begin? [1985], p.24) | |
| A reaction: Hence Christians probably focus less on brain-death than do doctors and the rest of us. |
| 4055 | It isn't obviously wicked to destroy a potential human being (e.g. an ununited egg and sperm) [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: A week-old embryo without a brain may be a potential human being, but so are a sperm and an ovum that are about to meet in a dish, and it wouldn't be wicked to keep those apart. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (When Does a Life Begin? [1985], p.19) | |
| A reaction: Sounds fine, but it may be a slippery slope. Is it acceptable to deny a place at music school to a potentially great musician? |
| 5716 | Nature runs the universe by herself without the aid of gods [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Nature is free and uncontrolled by proud masters and runs the universe by herself without the aid of gods. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], II.1094) | |
| A reaction: A nice remark. This apparent personification of nature implies the application of laws to an essentially passive reality. See Idea 5442 and Nature|Laws of Nature|Essentialism for a different view. |
| 5704 | There can be no centre in infinity [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: There can be no centre in infinity. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.1069) | |
| A reaction: This is highly significant, because if we can establish that the universe is infinite (as Epicurus believes), it follows that the human race cannot be at the centre of it, as the Ptolemaic/medieval view proposed. |
| 5703 | The universe must be limitless, since there could be nothing outside to limit it [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: The universe is not bounded in any direction. If it were, it would necessarily have a limit somewhere, but a thing cannot have a limit unless there is something outside to limit it. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.959) | |
| A reaction: This is a subtler argument than the mere enquiry about why you would have to stop at the end of the universe. It still seems a nice argument, though Einstein's curvature of space seems to have thwarted it. |
| 5693 | Everything is created and fed by nature from atoms, and they return to atoms in death [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: The ultimate realities of heaven and the gods are the atoms, from which nature creates all things and increases and feeds them, and into which, when they perish, nature again resolves them. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.46) | |
| A reaction: Sounds right to me. Nothing in modern particle theory and string theory has refuted this claim. But what makes the atoms move, and what makes them combine in an orderly way? Is the orderliness of atoms made of atoms? Essences? |
| 5701 | If an object is infinitely subdivisible, it will be the same as the whole universe [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: If there are no atoms, the smallest bodies will have infinite parts, since they can be endlessly halved. ..But then there will be no difference between the smallest thing and the whole universe, as they will equally have infinite parts. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.620) | |
| A reaction: Another argument which remains effective even now. There must surely (intuitively) be more divisions possible in a large object than in a small one? Unless of course there were many different sizes of infinity…. See Cantor. |
| 5708 | In downward motion, atoms occasionally swerve slightly for no reason [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: When atoms are travelling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places they swerve ever so little from their course. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], II.217) | |
| A reaction: Never a popular theory because it seems to breach the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Ideas 306 + 3646). This seems to be the beginning of a strong need for the concept of free will, and an underlying explanation. Most thinkers put mind outside nature. |
| 2962 | Maybe causation is a form of rational explanation, not an observation or a state of mind [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: It is tempting to see the concept of causation as a product of reason rather than of perception or introspection; something that reason brings to bear on the data of sense, by way of imposing an explanatory order on them. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.154) |
| 17004 | Nothing can break the binding laws of eternity [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Nothing has power to break the binding laws of eternity. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], 5.56) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be virtually the only remark from the ancient world suggesting that there are 'laws' of nature, so I'm guessing it is a transient metaphor, not a theory about nature. 'Even the gods must bow to necessity'. |
| 5706 | Atoms move themselves [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Atoms move themselves. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], II.133) | |
| A reaction: Something has to move itself, I suppose, but then that could be psuché, giving us free will (see Idea 1424). Why does Epicurus need the 'swerve' if atoms are self-movers? See Idea 5708. |
| 5696 | If there were no space there could be no movement, or even creation [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: We see movement everywhere, but if there were no empty space, things would be denied the power of movement - or rather, they could not possibly have come into existence, embedded as they would have been in motionless matter. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.342) | |
| A reaction: This still seems a good argument, if reality is made of particles. People can move in a crowd until it becomes too dense. |
| 5700 | It is quicker to break things up than to assemble them [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Anything can be more speedily disintegrated than put together again. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.558) | |
| A reaction: Clearly the concept of entropy was around long before anyone tried to give a systematic or mathematical account of it. |
| 2949 | We have the confused idea that time is a process of change [Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Somehow we have got it into our heads that time itself is a process of change. | |
| From: Michael Lockwood (Mind, Brain and the Quantum [1989], p.12) |
| 5698 | We can only sense time by means of movement, or its absence [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: It must not be claimed that anyone can sense time by itself apart from the movement of things or their restful immobility. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.465) | |
| A reaction: This seems a remarkably Einsteinian remark, though he is only talking of the epistemology of the matter, not the ontology. We are not far from the concept of space-time here. |
| 5715 | This earth is very unlikely to be the only one created [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: It is in the highest degree unlikely that this earth and sky is the only one to have been created. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], II.1057) | |
| A reaction: I can only admire the science fiction imagination of this, which roughly agrees with the assessment of modern cosmologists. We think imagination was cramped in the ancient world, and now wanders free - but that is not so. |
| 5694 | Nothing can be created by divine power out of nothing [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: In studying the workings of nature, our starting-point will be this principle: nothing can ever be created by divine power out of nothing. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.152) | |
| A reaction: This claim seems to cry out for a bit of empiricist caution. What observation has convinced Lucretius that creation out of nothing is impossible? The early Christians switched to the view that divine creation is 'ex nihilo' - out of nothing. |
| 5699 | If matter wasn't everlasting, everything would have disappeared by now [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: If the matter in things had not been everlasting, everything by now would have gone back to nothing, and the things we see would be the product of rebirth out of nothing. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.544) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 1431, which is Aquinas's Third Way of proving God. Aquinas thinks there must be a necessary being outside of the system, but Lucretius thinks there must be some necessary existence within the system (as Hume had suggested). |
| 5707 | The universe can't have been created by gods, because it is too imperfect [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: The universe was certainly not created for us by divine power: it is so full of imperfections. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], II.180) | |
| A reaction: This is certainly a problem if God is 'supremely perfect', as Descartes proposed, because then the universe would also have to be supremely perfect. See Idea 2114 for a possible answer from Leibniz. Hume agrees with Epicurus about design. |
| 5710 | Gods are tranquil and aloof, and have no need of or interest in us [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: The nature of deity is to enjoy immortal existence in utter tranquillity, aloof and detached from our affairs. It is free from all pain and peril, strong in its own resources, exempt from any need of us, indifferent to our merits and immune from anger. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], II.652) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the seed of late seventeenth century deism - the idea of a Creator who is now absent, and ignores our prayers. At that time 'Epicurean' became a synonym for atheist, but Epicureans never quite reached that point. |
| 5731 | Why does Jupiter never hurl lightning from a blue sky? [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Why does Jupiter never hurl his thunderbolt upon the earth and let loose his thunder out of a sky that is wholly blue? | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], VI.400) | |
| A reaction: Nice question! It really doesn't take very much to see through superstition, and the fact that most people believed such things shows how staggeringly uncritical they were in their thinking, until philosophers appeared and taught them how to reason. |
| 5722 | For a separated spirit to remain sentient it would need sense organs attached to it [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: If spirit is immortal and can remain sentient when divorced from our body, we must credit it with possession of five senses; but eyes or nostrils or hand or tongue or ears cannot be attached to a disembodied spirit. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], III.624) | |
| A reaction: This is a powerful argument against immortality. If you are going to see, you must interact with photons; to hear you must respond to compression waves; to smell you must react to certain molecules. Immortality without those would be a bit dull. |
| 5725 | An immortal mind couldn't work harmoniously with a mortal body [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: It is crazy to couple a mortal object with an eternal and suppose that they can work in harmony and mutually interact. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], III.799) | |
| A reaction: An interesting thought, though not a terrible persuasive argument. A god would indeed be a bit restless if it were chained to a human being, but it would presumably knuckle down to the task if firmly instructed to do it by Zeus. |
| 5720 | Spirit is mortal [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Spirit is mortal. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], III.542) | |
| A reaction: This is asserted at an historical moment when immortality is beginning to grip everyone's imagination. |
| 5721 | The mind is very small smooth particles, which evaporate at death [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: Since the substance of the mind is extraordinarily mobile, it must consist of particles exceptionally small and smooth and round, ..so that, when the spirit has escaped from the body, the outside of the limbs appears intact and there is no loss of weight. | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], III.201) | |
| A reaction: Lucretius is wonderfully attentive to interesting evidence. He goes on to compare it to the evaporation of perfume. The fine-grained connections of the brain are not far off what he is proposing. |
| 5723 | If spirit is immortal and enters us at birth, why don't we remember a previous existence? [Lucretius] |
| Full Idea: If the spirit is by nature immortal and is slipped into the body at birth, why do we retain no memory of an earlier existence, no impress of antecedent events? | |
| From: Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], III.670) | |
| A reaction: Plato took the view that we do recall previous existence, as seen in our innate ideas. This problem forced the Christian church into the uncomfortable claim that God creates the soul at conception, but that it then goes on to immortality. |