25 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) |
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) |
6900 | A prior understanding of beauty is needed to assert that the Form of the Beautiful is beautiful [Westaway] |
Full Idea: If it were asserted that the Form of the Beautiful was itself beautiful, such a statement would require a prior understanding of the concept of beauty, so would immediately lead to an infinite regress, so the Forms can't be self-predicating. | |
From: Luke Westaway (talk [2005]), quoted by PG - Db (ideas) | |
A reaction: This is a nice clear statement of the mess that Plato gets himself into if he wants the Forms to be self-predicating. Clearly the Form of the Beautiful can't be beautiful, but must be that which gives other things their beauty. |
6956 | At what point does an object become 'whole'? [Westaway] |
Full Idea: At what point does an object become 'whole'? | |
From: Luke Westaway (talk [2005]), quoted by PG - Db (ideas) | |
A reaction: This nice question strikes me as the central one in mereology. It is tempting to reply that the matter is entirely conventional, but there seems an obvious fact about something missing if one piece is absent from a jigsaw, or a cube is chipped. |
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) |
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) |
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. |
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). |
7335 | The Chinese Room should be able to ask itself questions in Mandarin [Westaway] |
Full Idea: If the Chinese Room is functionally equivalent to a Mandarin speaker, it ought to be able to ask itself questions in Mandarin (and it can't). | |
From: Luke Westaway (talk [2005]), quoted by PG - Db (ideas) | |
A reaction: Searle might triumphantly say that this proves there is no understanding in the room, but the objection won't go away, because the room is presumably functionally equivalent to a speaker, and not just a mere translator (who might use mechanical tricks). |
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. |
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. |
7861 | Libet says the processes initiated in the cortex can still be consciously changed [Libet, by Papineau] |
Full Idea: Libet himself points out that the conscious decisions still have the power to 'endorse' or 'cancel', so to speak, the processes initiated by the earlier cortical activity: no action will result if the action's execution is consciously countermanded. | |
From: report of Benjamin Libet (Unconscious Cerebral Initiative [1985]) by David Papineau - Thinking about Consciousness 1.4 | |
A reaction: This is why Libet's findings do not imply 'epiphenomenalism'. It seems that part of a decisive action is non-conscious, undermining the all-or-nothing view of consciousness. Searle tries to smuggle in free will at this point (Idea 3817). |
6660 | Libet found conscious choice 0.2 secs before movement, well after unconscious 'readiness potential' [Libet, by Lowe] |
Full Idea: Libet found that a subject's conscious choice to move was about a fifth of a second before movement, and thus later than the onset of the brain's so-called 'readiness potential', which seems to imply that unconscious processes initiates action. | |
From: report of Benjamin Libet (Unconscious Cerebral Initiative [1985]) by E.J. Lowe - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind Ch.9 | |
A reaction: Of great interest to philosophers! It seems to make conscious choices epiphenomenal. The key move, I think, is to give up the idea of consciousness as being all-or-nothing. My actions are still initiated by 'me', but 'me' shades off into unconsciousness. |
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) |
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) |