display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 7131 | The intellect and senses are a simplifying apparatus [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The intellect and the senses are, above all, a simplifying apparatus. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[46]) | |
| A reaction: This seems like a profound truth to me. The world, and our own bodies, are of almost infinite complexity, such that only a god could grasp it. In order to teach, we have to simplify even further. We choose a level of simplification for contexts. |
| 7152 | With protoplasm ½+½=2, so the soul is not an indivisible monad [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Along the guiding thread of the body. When protoplasm divides ½ + ½ does not = 1, but = 2. Thus the belief in the soul as monad becomes untenable. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[68]) | |
| A reaction: This is presumably an anticipatory remark about the cutting of the corpus callosum (in the brain), which seems to cut a physical person into two people. Personally I always found the absolute unity of the mind or person implausible. |
| 7130 | Unity is not in the conscious 'I', but in the organism, which uses the self as a tool [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: If I have anything of a unity within me, it certainly doesn't lie in the conscious 'I' and in feeling, willing, thinking, but somewhere else: in the ... prudence of my whole organism, of which my conscious self is only a tool. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[46]) | |
| A reaction: What an interesting thinker Nietzsche was! I think I agree with this. I think the self is built on the necessary internalised body-map all animals must have. The body requires the map, not the map needing the body. |
| 7155 | Consciousness exists to the extent that consciousness is useful [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness exists to the extent that consciousness is useful. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[95]) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a great truth, first because it emphasises the necessity of giving an evolutionary (survival) explanation of consciousness, and also because it invites us to consider the 'extent' to which we are conscious of brain activity. |
| 7143 | Consciousness is a 'tool' - just as the stomach is a tool [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is just a 'tool' and nothing more - in the same sense that the stomach is a tool. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 37[4]) | |
| A reaction: Nietzsche was very critical of Darwin, but he absorbed his teachings quicker than anyone. I agree with this, and with Fodor (Idea 2508), that to understand a mind you must think about why we have minds. |