4 ideas
| 10121 | Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor lack of contradiction a sign of truth [Pascal] |
| Full Idea: Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth. | |
| From: Blaise Pascal (works [1660]), quoted by A.George / D.J.Velleman - Philosophies of Mathematics Ch.6 | |
| A reaction: [Quoted in Auden and Kronenberger's Book of Aphorisms] Presumably we would now say that contradiction is a purely formal, syntactic notion, and not a semantic one. If you hit a contradiction, something has certainly gone wrong. |
| 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 |
| 7388 | McGinn invites surrender, by saying it is hopeless trying to imagine conscious machines [Dennett on McGinn] |
| Full Idea: McGinn invites his readers to join him in surrender: It's just impossible to imagine how software could make a conscious robot. Don't even try, he says. Other philosophical experiments (involving China) "work" by dissuading readers from imagining. | |
| From: comment on Colin McGinn (The Problem of Consciousness [1991]) by Daniel C. Dennett - Consciousness Explained 14.1 | |
| A reaction: I agree with Dennett. If you don't try to imagine how robots might do it, you are also denied the right to try to imagine how brains might manage it. Admittedly this is hard, but good imagination needs study, effort, discussion, time, information... |
| 3185 | Multiple realisability rules out hidden essences and experts as the source of water- and gold-concepts [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: The multiple realisability emphasised by functionalists rules out the hidden essences (and the 'deferential' move in semantics) that one finds in the cases, for example, of "water" and "gold" emphasised by Kripke and Putnam. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Problem of Consciousness [1991], p.132) | |
| A reaction: Presumably if they are 'hidden', then the people to whom we 'defer' for our concepts can't actually know about the essences we are supposed to be discussing. You can mean essences without knowing them. Cf. Loch Ness Monster. |