24 ideas
| 20457 | Zeno assumes collecting an infinity of things makes an infinite thing [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: One possible answer is that Zeno is wrong because it is not true that by accumulating an infinite number of things one ends up with an infinite thing. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 01) | |
| A reaction: I do love it when deep and complex ideas are expressed with perfect simplicity. As long as the simple version is correct. |
| 20468 | Quantum mechanics deals with processes, rather than with things [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: Quantum mechanics teaches us not to think about the world in terms of 'things' which are in this or that state, but in terms of 'processes' instead. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) |
| 20467 | Quantum mechanics describes the world entirely as events [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) | |
| A reaction: I presume a philosopher is allowed to ask what an 'event' is. Since, as Rovelli tells it, time is eliminated from the picture, events seem to be unanalysable primitives. |
| 5901 | Is 'productive of happiness' the definition of 'right', or the cause of it? [Ross on Bentham] |
| Full Idea: Bentham has not made up his mind whether he thinks that 'right' means 'productive of the general happiness', or that being productive of the general happiness is what makes acts right (and he would have thought the difference unimportant). | |
| From: comment on Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789]) by W. David Ross - The Right and the Good §I | |
| A reaction: The issue is whether rightness exists as a concept separate from happiness. I take it Bentham would vote for the first reading, as he has no interest in what is right, apart from increasing happiness. |
| 5934 | Of Bentham's 'dimensions' of pleasure, only intensity and duration matter [Ross on Bentham] |
| Full Idea: Most of Bentham's 'dimensions' of pleasure refer to further pleasures, or are irrelevant to the pleasure; we are left with intensity and duration as the characteristics on which depend the value of a pleasure qua pleasure, and there is nothing to add. | |
| From: comment on Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789]) by W. David Ross - The Right and the Good §VI | |
| A reaction: I agree. When Bentham produces his list he seems to be trying to add a bogus enrichment to what is really a rather crude and basic notion of the aim of life. Your simple hedonist appears to only desire high intensity and long duration. |
| 3777 | Pleasure and pain control all human desires and duties [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], I.1) | |
| A reaction: Ridiculous. Both halves are false. We pursue things for other reasons, and to deny this makes his idea a tautology. Deep ecology has nothing to do with human pleasure or pain. |
| 7903 | The six perfections are giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom [Nagarjuna] |
| Full Idea: The six perfections are of giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom. | |
| From: Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnaparamitashastra [c.120], 88) | |
| A reaction: What is 'morality', if giving is not part of it? I like patience and vigour being two of the virtues, which immediately implies an Aristotelian mean (which is always what is 'appropriate'). |
| 3554 | Bentham thinks happiness is feeling good, but why use morality to achieve that? [Annas on Bentham] |
| Full Idea: It is easy to fall into Bentham's mindless assumption that happiness must be a specific state of feeling good about something, but it is mysterious why anyone would think morality a good strategy for achieving this. | |
| From: comment on Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789]) by Julia Annas - The Morality of Happiness 2.7 |
| 3781 | The value of pleasures and pains is their force [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: It behoves the legislator to understand the force of pleasures and pains, which is their value. | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], IV.1) |
| 3778 | The community's interest is a sum of individual interests [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: The interest of the community is the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it. | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], I.4) |
| 20280 | Large mature animals are more rational than babies. But all that really matters is - can they suffer? [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational animal than an infant of a day, or even a month, old. But suppose they be otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], XVIII 1 n), quoted by Peter Singer - Practical Ethics 03 | |
| A reaction: This is certainly an inspiring, and even shocking question, which never seems to have been so directly asked before in the entire history of European thought. Awesome. |
| 3779 | Unnatural, when it means anything, means infrequent [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: Unnatural, when it means anything, means unfrequent. | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], II.14 n8.9) |
| 20469 | There are probably no infinities, and 'infinite' names what we do not yet know [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: 'Infinite', ultimately, is the name that we give to what we do not yet know. Nature appears to be telling us that there is nothing truly infinite. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 11) |
| 20461 | The basic ideas of fields and particles are merged in quantum mechanics [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: The notions of fields and particles, separated by Faraday and Maxwell, end up merging in quantum mechanics. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) | |
| A reaction: This sounds to me just like Anaximander's 'apeiron' - the unlimited [Rovelli agrees! p.168]. Anaximander predicted the wall which enquiry would hit, but we now have more detail. |
| 20462 | Because it is quantised, a field behaves like a set of packets of energy [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: Since the energy of the electromagnetic field can take on only certain values, the field behaves like a set of packets of energy. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) |
| 20463 | There are about fifteen particles fields, plus a few force fields [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: There are about fifteen fields, whose quanta are elementary particles (electrons, quarks, muons, neutrinos, Higgs, and little else), plus a few fields similar to the electromagnetic one, which describe forces at a nuclear scale, with quanta like photons. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) | |
| A reaction: According to Rovelli, this sentence describes the essence of physical reality. |
| 20464 | The world consists of quantum fields, with elementary events happening in spacetime [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: The world is not made up of fields and particles, but of a single type of entity: the quantum field. There are no longer particles which move in space with the passage of time, but quantum fields whose elementary events happen in spacetime. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) | |
| A reaction: If you are not a scientist, there is (I find) a strong tendency to read and digest stuff like this, and then forget it the next day, because it so far from our experience. Folk like me have to develop two parallel views of the nature of reality. |
| 20460 | Electrons are not waves, because their collisions are at a point, and not spread out [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: Schrödinger's wave is a bad image for an electron, because when a particle collides with something else, it is always at a point: it is never spread out in space like a wave. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04 note) | |
| A reaction: And yet there is the diffusion in the two-slit experiment, which Thomas Young discovered for light. I must take Rovelli's word for this. |
| 20459 | Electrons only exist when they interact, and their being is their combination of quantum leaps [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: Electrons don't always exist. They exist when they interact. They materialize when they collide with something. The quantum leap from one orbit to another constitutes their way of being real. An electron is a combination of leaps between interactions. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) | |
| A reaction: If a philosopher with an Aristotelian interest in the nature of matter wants to grasp the modern view, the electron looks like the thing to focus on. You can feel Rovelli battling here to find formulations that might satisfy a philosopher. |
| 20466 | Quantum Theory describes events and possible interactions - not how things are [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: Quantum Theory does not describe things as they are: it describes how things occur and interact with each other. It doesn't describe where there is a particle but how it shows itself to others. The world of existence is reduced to possible interactions. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) | |
| A reaction: Fans of 'process philosophy' should like this, though he is not denying that there may be facts about how things are - it is just that this is not mentioned in the theory. There is not much point in philosophers yearning to know the reality. |
| 20465 | Nature has three aspects: granularity, indeterminacy, and relations [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: I think that quantum mechanics has revealed three aspects of the nature of things: granularity, indeterminacy, and the relational structure of the world. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) |
| 20458 | The world is just particles plus fields; space is the gravitational field [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: The world is made up of particles + fields, and nothing else; there is no need to add space as an extra ingredient. Newton's space is the gravitational field. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 03) | |
| A reaction: I get the impression that particles are just bumps or waves in the fields [yes! Rovelli p.110], which would mean there are fields and nothing else. And no one seems to know what a field is. |
| 20470 | Only heat distinguishes past from future [Rovelli] |
| Full Idea: It is always heat and only heat that distinguishes the past from the future. | |
| From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 12) | |
| A reaction: I can remember the past but not the future - so can that fact be reduced to facts about heat? |
| 3780 | We must judge a thing morally to know if it conforms to God's will [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: It is necessary to know first whether a thing is right in order to know from thence whether it be conformable to the will of God. | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Intro to Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789], II.18) |