display all the ideas for this combination of texts
9 ideas
12935 | Every feeling is the perception of a truth [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: Every feeling is the perception of a truth. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.02) | |
A reaction: I wouldn't say feelings ARE perceptions of truths, but I might say that every experience we have has an intellectual dimension as well as an emotional one. Our beliefs drift and solidify in just the same way that feelings do. |
3979 | The Turing Machine is the best idea yet about how the mind works [Fodor on Turing] |
Full Idea: Alan Turing had (in his theory of the 'Turing Machine') what I suppose is the best thought about how the mind works that anyone has had so far. | |
From: comment on Alan Turing (Computing Machinery and Intelligence [1950]) by Jerry A. Fodor - Jerry A. Fodor on himself p.296 | |
A reaction: I am not convinced, because I don't think rationality is possible without consciousness. The brain may bypass the representations used by a computer. |
5321 | In 50 years computers will successfully imitate humans with a 70% success rate [Turing] |
Full Idea: In about fifty years' time it will be possible to program computers to play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70% chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. | |
From: Alan Turing (Computing Machinery and Intelligence [1950], p.57), quoted by Robert Kirk - Mind and Body §5.9 | |
A reaction: This is the famous prophecy called 'The Turing Test'. The current state (2004) seems to be that the figure of 70% is very near, but no one sees much prospect of advancing much further in the next 100 years. Dennett sees jokes as a big problem. |
12950 | We must distinguish images from exact defined ideas [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: It is essential to distinguish images from exact ideas which are composed of definitions. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.09) | |
A reaction: See Idea 12615, which is attacking Descartes and Locke, I think, but fails to register that Spinoza and Leibniz had got the notion of an 'idea' much more clearly. |
19357 | The idea of green seems simple, but it must be compounded of the ideas of blue and yellow [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: It is obvious that green comes from a mixture of blue and yellow; which makes it credible that the idea of green is composed of the ideas of those two colours, although the idea of green appears to us as simple as that of blue. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.07) | |
A reaction: This shows the use of 'idea' at that time for non-verbal mental events and concepts. Ideas are not, then, just undestood as phenomena, but can be analysed and explained more deeply. |
12938 | An idea is an independent inner object, which expresses the qualities of things [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: An idea is an immediate inner object, which expresses the nature or qualities of things, ..but since it is the object of thought it can exist before and after the thoughts. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
A reaction: This sounds something like Frege's 'third realm' between mind and world (Idea 7740). Notice that Leibniz is also using the word 'object' in this context. Leibniz doesn't make the mistake of confusing concepts and images, as many did. |
12945 | Thoughts correspond to sensations, but ideas are independent of thoughts [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: I distinguish ideas from thoughts. For we always have all our pure or distinct ideas independently of the senses, but thoughts always correspond to some sensation. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
A reaction: Leibniz's concept of an 'idea' is quite different from the empiricist notion of them, and strikes me as being much closer to Frege's notion of a concept. On the whole I like the Leibniz account best. |
12995 | The name 'gold' means what we know of gold, and also further facts about it which only others know [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: The name 'gold' signifies not merely what the speaker knows of gold , but also what he does not know, which may be known by someone else: an inner constitution from which flow colour and weight, and generates other properties. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.11) | |
A reaction: [compressed] Thus in the course of defending true essences of gold (against Locke's claim that we are stuck with the nominal essence), Leibniz drifts into an externalist account of meaning. He mentions experts, as so often does Putnam. |
12807 | The word 'gold' means a hidden constitution known to experts, and not just its appearances [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: The name 'gold' signifies not only what he who pronounces it knows about it, for example, something very heavy and yellow, but also what he does not know, and that another can know about it, its internal constitution from which colour and weight flow. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 6.6.354), quoted by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz and Locke on Essences | |
A reaction: Leibniz goes on to use the word 'expert'. This isn't just a hint of Putnam's externalism about concepts like 'water' - it is a clear spelling out of the full idea. Locke would have been astounded by 'atomic number 79', and Leibniz would be, like, 'yeah'. |