3 ideas
| 13007 | Archimedes defined a straight line as the shortest distance between two points [Archimedes, by Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Archimedes gave a sort of definition of 'straight line' when he said it is the shortest line between two points. | |
| From: report of Archimedes (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Gottfried Leibniz - New Essays on Human Understanding 4.13 | |
| A reaction: Commentators observe that this reduces the purity of the original Euclidean axioms, because it involves distance and measurement, which are absent from the purest geometry. |
| 1556 | By nature people are close to one another, but culture drives them apart [Hippias] |
| Full Idea: I regard you all as relatives - by nature, not by convention. By nature like is akin to like, but convention is a tyrant over humankind and often constrains people to act contrary to nature. | |
| From: Hippias (fragments/reports [c.430 BCE]), quoted by Plato - Protagoras 337c8 |
| 6552 | You can only explain the qualities of large objects using entities which lack those qualities [Heisenberg] |
| Full Idea: It is impossible to explain the manifest qualities of ordinary middle-sized objects except by tracing these back to the behaviour of entities which themselves no longer possess these qualities. | |
| From: Werner Heisenberg (Ancient Thought in Modern Physics [1937], p.119), quoted by William Lycan - Consciousness 8.10 | |
| A reaction: Compare the similar wonderful remark by Lucretius (Idea 5713). If we accept this as a general principle for all of nature (including us) - and I do - then it is silly to complain that consciousness isn't found in basic physics. |