28 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) |
| 11976 | Aristotelian essentialism says essences are not relative to specification [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: So-called 'Aristotelian essentialism' is the doctrine of essences not relative to specifications. | |
| From: David Lewis (Counterpart theory and Quant. Modal Logic [1968], III) | |
| A reaction: In other words, they are so-called 'real essences', understood as de re. Quine says essences are all de dicto, and relative to some specification. I vote for Aristotle. |
| 11978 | Causal necessities hold in all worlds compatible with the laws of nature [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Just as a sentence is necessary if it holds in all worlds, so it is causally necessary if it holds in all worlds compatible with the laws of nature. | |
| From: David Lewis (Counterpart theory and Quant. Modal Logic [1968], V) | |
| A reaction: I don't believe in the so-called 'laws of nature', so I'm not buying that. Is there no distinction in Lewis's view between those sentences which must hold, and those which happen to hold universally? |
| 11979 | It doesn't take the whole of a possible Humphrey to win the election [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Even if Humphrey is a modal continuant, it doesn't take the whole of him to do such things as winning. | |
| From: David Lewis (Counterpart theory and Quant. Modal Logic [1968], Post B) | |
| A reaction: This responds to Kripke's famous example, that people only care about what happens to themselves, and not to some 'counterpart' of themselves. |
| 16994 | Counterpart theory is bizarre, as no one cares what happens to a mere counterpart [Kripke on Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Probably Humphrey could not care less whether someone else, no matter how much resembling him, would have been victorious in another possible world. Thus Lewis's view seems even more bizarre that the usual transworld identification it replaces. | |
| From: comment on David Lewis (Counterpart theory and Quant. Modal Logic [1968]) by Saul A. Kripke - Naming and Necessity notes and addenda note 13 | |
| A reaction: I begin to see this as a devastating reply to a theory I previously found quite congenial. |
| 11974 | Counterparts are not the original thing, but resemble it more than other things do [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Your counterparts resemble you closely in content and context in important respects. They resemble you more closely than do the other things in their worlds. But they are not really you. | |
| From: David Lewis (Counterpart theory and Quant. Modal Logic [1968], I) | |
| A reaction: It is a dilemma. If my counterpart were exactly me, I couldn't contemplate possibly losing a leg, or my sanity. But if my counterpart isn't exactly me, then I don't have much interest in its fate. Only essences can save us here. Cf. me tomorrow. |
| 11975 | If the closest resembler to you is in fact quite unlike you, then you have no counterpart [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: If whatever thing in world w6 it is that resembles you more closely than anything else in w6 is nevertheless quite unlike you; nothing in w6 resembles you at all closely. If so, you have no counterpart in w6. | |
| From: David Lewis (Counterpart theory and Quant. Modal Logic [1968], I) | |
| A reaction: This is the nub, because the whole theory rests on deciding whether two things resemble sufficiently 'closely'. But then we need a criterion of closeness, so we must start talking about which properties matter. Essences loom. |
| 11977 | Essential attributes are those shared with all the counterparts [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: An essential attribute of something is an attribute it shares with all its counterparts. | |
| From: David Lewis (Counterpart theory and Quant. Modal Logic [1968], III) | |
| A reaction: I don't like this. It ties essence entirely to identity, but I think essence precedes identity. Essence is a nexus of causal and explanatory powers which bestows an identity on each thing. But essence might be unstable, and identity with it. |
| 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). |
| 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. |
| 3284 | There is no one theory of how to act (or what to believe) [Nagel] |
| Full Idea: To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe. | |
| From: Thomas Nagel (The Fragmentation of Value [1977], p.135) | |
| A reaction: Depends on your level of generality. Values and virtues are general guides which should be brought to every action, with 'higher' values guiding choice of what is relevant. |
| 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) |