36 ideas
| 3600 | Slow and accurate thought makes the greatest progress [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Those who go forward only very slowly can progress much further if they always keep to the right path, than those who run and wander off it. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §1.2) | |
| A reaction: Like Descartes' 'Method'. This seems to place a low value on 'nous' or intuition. |
| 3601 | Most things in human life seem vain and useless [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Looking at the various activities and enterprises of mankind with the eye of a philosopher, there is hardly one which does not seem to me vain and useless. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §1.3) | |
| A reaction: Well, yes. The obvious retort is that everything is vain and useless; or if not, then certainly metaphysics is. Useful for what? Is ornamental gardening useless, or sport? Art? What is the use of cosmology? He's right, of course. |
| 3602 | Almost every daft idea has been expressed by some philosopher [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: There is nothing one can imagine so strange or so unbelievable that has not been said by one or other of the philosophers. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §2.16) | |
| A reaction: Actually I think that extensive areas of logical possibilities for existence remain totally unexplored. On the other hand, most of the metaphysical beliefs of most of the human race, including the majority of philosophers, strike me as being false. |
| 3603 | Methodical thinking is cautious, analytical, systematic, and panoramic [Descartes, by PG] |
| Full Idea: Descartes' four principles for his method of thinking are: be cautious, analyse the problem, be systematic from simple to complex, and keep an overview of the problem | |
| From: report of René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §2.18) by PG - Db (ideas) |
| 3612 | Clear and distinct conceptions are true because a perfect God exists [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: That the things we grasp very clearly and very distinctly are all true, is assured only because God is or exists, and because he is a perfect Being. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.38) |
| 3610 | Truth is clear and distinct conception - of which it is hard to be sure [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I take it as a general rule that the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true, but that there is merely some difficulty in properly discerning which are those which we distinctly conceive. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.33) |
| 3605 | We can believe a thing without knowing we believe it [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The action of thought by which one believes a thing, being different from that by which one knows that one believes it, they often exist the one without the other. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §3.23) |
| 1583 | In morals Descartes accepts the conventional, but rejects it in epistemology [Roochnik on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Descartes' procedure for treating values (accepting normal conventions when faced with uncertainty) is the exact antithesis of that used to attain knowledge. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §3.23) by David Roochnik - The Tragedy of Reason p.73 |
| 3607 | In thinking everything else false, my own existence remains totally certain [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: While I decided to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I who thought thus must be something; the truth 'I think therefore I am' was so certain that the most extravagant scepticism could never shake it. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.32) |
| 3617 | I aim to find the principles and causes of everything, using the seeds within my mind [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I have tried to find in general the principles or first causes of everything which is or which may be in the world, ..without taking them from any other source than from certain seeds of truth which are naturally in our minds. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §6.64) |
| 3611 | Understanding, rather than imagination or senses, gives knowledge [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Neither our imagination nor our senses could ever assure us of anything, if our understanding did not intervene. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.37) |
| 3606 | I was searching for reliable rock under the shifting sand [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: My whole plan had for its aim simply to give me assurance, and the rejection of shifting ground and sand in order to find rock or clay. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §3.29) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be characteristic of an age when religion is being quietly rocked by the revival of ancient scepticism. If he'd settled for fallibilism, our civilization would have gone differently. |
| 3604 | When rebuilding a house, one needs alternative lodgings [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Before beginning to rebuild the house in which one lives…. one must also provide oneself with some other accommodation in which to be lodge conveniently while the work is going on. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §3.22) |
| 3618 | Only experiments can settle disagreements between rival explanations [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I observe almost no individual effect without immediately knowing that it can be deduced in many different ways, ..and I know of no way to resolve this but by experiments such that the results are different according to different explanations. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §6.65) |
| 3615 | Little reason is needed to speak, so animals have no reason at all [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Animals not only have less reason than men, but they have none at all; for we see that very little of it is required in order to be able to speak. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §5.58) |
| 20657 | There are 23 core brain functions, with known circuit, transmitters, genes and behaviour [Watson] |
| Full Idea: In 2014 the National Institutes of Mental Health published a list of 23 core brain functions and their associated neural circuitry, neurotransmitters and genes, and the behaviour and emotions that go with them. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 16 'Physics') | |
| A reaction: They were interested in the functions behind mental health, but I am interested in the functions behind our belief systems, which might produce a different focus. Sub-functions, perhaps. |
| 3609 | I am a thinking substance, which doesn't need a place or material support [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I concluded that I was a substance, of which the whole essence or nature consists in thinking, and which, in order to exist, needs no place and depends on no material thing. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.33) | |
| A reaction: To me that sounds like "I concluded that I wasn't a human being", which highlights the bizarre wishful thinking that seems to have gripped the human race for the first few thousand years of its serious thinking. |
| 3608 | I can deny my body and the world, but not my own existence [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I could pretend that I had no body, and that there was no world or place that I was in, but I could not, for all that, pretend that I did not exist. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.32) | |
| A reaction: He makes the (in my opinion) appalling blunder of thinking that because he can pretend that he has no body, that therefore he might not have one. I can pretend that gold is an unusual form of cheese. However, "I don't exist" certainly sounds wrong. |
| 3613 | Reason is universal in its responses, but a physical machine is constrained by its organs [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Whereas reason is a universal instrument which can serve on any kind of occasion, the organs of a machine need a disposition for each action; so it is impossible to have enough different organs in a machine to respond to all the occurrences of life. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §5.57) | |
| A reaction: How can Descartes know that reason is 'universal' rather than just 'very extensive'? Is there any information which cannot be encoded in a computer? It doesn't feel as if there any intrinsic restrictions to reason, but note Idea 4688. |
| 3616 | The soul must unite with the body to have appetites and sensations [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It is not sufficient that the reasonable soul should be lodged in the body like a pilot in a ship, unless perhaps to move its limbs, but it needs to be united more closely with the body in order to have sensations and appetites, and so be a true man. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §5.59) | |
| A reaction: The idea that the pineal gland is the link suggests that Descartes has the 'pilot' view, but this idea shows that he believes in very close and complex interaction between mind and body. But how can a mind 'have' appetites if it has no physical needs? |
| 20656 | Traditional ideas of the mind were weakened in the 1950s by mind-influencing drugs [Watson] |
| Full Idea: One development in particular in the 1950s helped to discredit the traditional concept of the mind. This was medical drugs that influenced the workings of the brain. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 16 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: This explains Ryle's 1949 book, and the Australian physicalists emerging in the late 1950s. Philosophers don't grasp how their subject is responsive to other areas of human knowledge. Of course, opium had always done this. |
| 3614 | A machine could speak in response to physical stimulus, but not hold a conversation [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: One may conceive of a machine made so as to emit words, and even emit them in response to a change in its bodily organs, such as being touched, but not to reply to the sense of everything said in its presence, as the most unintelligent men can. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §5.56) | |
| A reaction: A critique of the Turing Test, written in 1637! You have to admire. Because of the advent of the microprocessor, we can 'conceive' more sophisticated, multi-level machines than Descartes could come up with. |
| 20655 | Humans have been hunter-gatherers for 99.5% of their existence [Watson] |
| Full Idea: Anthropology shows that the hunter-gathering lifestyle has occupied 99.5 per cent of the time humans have been on earth. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 13 'Emergence') | |
| A reaction: If you are trying to understand humanity, you ignore this fact at your peril. Even agriculture is only a tiny part of our history, and that only disappeared as a major human activity (in many nations) in the last hundred years. |
| 1581 | Greeks elevate virtues enormously, but never explain them [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The ancient pagans place virtues on a high plateau and make them appear the most valuable thing in the world, but they do not sufficiently instruct us about how to know them. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §1.8) |
| 20887 | A rape disregards the status of being a person - but so does all assault [Foa] |
| Full Idea: In a rape a person is used without proper regard for her personhood - but this is true of every kind of assault. | |
| From: Pamela Foa (What's Wrong with Rape? [1977], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is a good step towards her attempt to pin down what is specifically wrong with rape, which strikes me as an extremely important question, and not merely in order to justify punishments. |
| 20888 | Rape of children is dreadful, but no one thinks children should have a right of consent [Foa] |
| Full Idea: Rape of children is at least as heinous as rape of adults, though few believe that children have or ought to have the same large domain of consent adults (male and female) ought to have. | |
| From: Pamela Foa (What's Wrong with Rape? [1977], 1) | |
| A reaction: A powerful point. She is not quite spelling out the crux, which is that no one thinks children should have a right to consent to sexual intercourse, which means that consent is irrelevant in such a case of rape. So it can't be the key to adult rape? |
| 20889 | If men should lust and women shouldn't, that makes rape the prevalent sexual model [Foa] |
| Full Idea: We are taught that sexual desires are desires women ought not to have and men must have. This is the model which makes necessary an eternal battle of the sexes. It explains why rape is the prevalent model of sexuality. | |
| From: Pamela Foa (What's Wrong with Rape? [1977], 3) | |
| A reaction: A striking thought. See 'The Origins of Sex' by F.Dabhoiwala, which claims that women used to be seen as the sexual predators, and the balance shifted in the 18thC. Are women obliged to exhibit lust, in order to defuse rapacious desires? |
| 20650 | The Uncertainty Principle implies that cause and effect can't be measured [Watson] |
| Full Idea: The Uncertainty Principle implied that in the subatomic world cause and effect could never be measured. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 05 'Against') | |
| A reaction: The fact that it can't be measured does not, presumably, entail that it doesn't exist. Physicists seem to ignore causation, rather than denying it. Can causation be real if it only exists at the macro-level, as an emergent phenomenon? |
| 16686 | God has established laws throughout nature, and implanted ideas of them within us [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I have noticed certain laws that God has so established in nature, and of which he has implanted such notions in our souls, that …we cannot doubt that they are exactly observed in everything that exists or occurs in the world. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], pt 5), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 15.5 | |
| A reaction: This is the view of laws which still seems to be with us (and needs extirpating) - that some outside agency imposes them on nature. I suspect that even Richard Feynman thought of laws like that, because he despised philosophy, and was thus naïve. |
| 20649 | The interference of light through two slits confirmed that it is waves [Watson] |
| Full Idea: Thomas Young in 1803 confirmed the idea of Huyghens that light is waves, showing how light passing through two slits produces an interference pattern that resembles water waves sluicing through two slits. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 04 'Conception') | |
| A reaction: The great puzzle emerges when it also turns out to be quantised particles. |
| 20661 | Electrons rotate in hyrogen atoms 10^13 times per second [Watson] |
| Full Idea: In the hydrogen atom the electron rotates some 10,000 billion times per second. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 18 'Evolutionary') | |
| A reaction: That's an awful lot. Is it at the speed of light? |
| 20647 | Quantum theory explains why nature is made up of units, such as elements [Watson] |
| Full Idea: Planck's quantum idea explained so much, including the observation that the chemical world is made up of discrete units - the elements. Discrete elements implied fundamental units of matter that were themselves discrete (as Dalton had said). | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 4 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: The atomic theory was only finally confirmed by Einstein in 1905. This idea implies that the very lowest level of all must have distinct building blocks, but so far we have got down to 'fields', which seem to be a sort of 'foam'. |
| 20654 | Only four particles are needed for matter: up and down quark, electron, electron-neutrino [Watson] |
| Full Idea: We need twelve particles in the master equation of the standard model, but it is necessary to have only four to build a universe (up and down quarks, the electron and the electron neutrino (or lepton). The existence of the others is 'a bit of a mystery'. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 11 'First Three') |
| 20651 | The shape of molecules is important, as well as the atoms and their bonds [Watson] |
| Full Idea: Pauling showed that the architecture - the shape of molecules was relevant (as well as the bonds). This meant that molecules were just as important as atoms in the understanding of matter. Molecules were not just the sum of their parts. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 05 'Three') | |
| A reaction: If Aristotle struggled to understand matter, then so should modern philosophers. This involves thermodynamics and chemistry, as well as quantum theory. |
| 20652 | In 1828 the animal substance urea was manufactured from inorganic ingredients [Watson] |
| Full Idea: In 1828 Wöhler, in an iconic experiment, had manufactured an organic substance, urea, hitherto the product solely of animals, out of inorganic materials, and without any interventions of vital force. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 06 'Inorganic') | |
| A reaction: For reductionists like me, the gradual explanation of life in inorganic terms is the great role model of explanation. I take it for granted that the human mind will go the same way, despite partisan resistance from a lot of philosophers. |
| 20658 | Information is physical, and living can be seen as replicating and preserving information [Watson] |
| Full Idea: In passing information, physical changes take place, and information is thus physical. On this account, the act of living can be seen as replicating and preserving the information that a living body is comprised of. | |
| From: Peter Watson (Convergence [2016], 17 'Dreams') | |
| A reaction: [He emphasises 'the act' of living, rather than a life] |