Reading Notes: April 25th, 2022

“Reductive functionalism asserts that the type identity conditions for mental states refer only to relations between inputs, outputs, and each other. It does not assert that such relations cause mental states but rather that they are numerically identical to (i.e., one and the same as) mental states. Thus, each conscious experience, being a species of mental state, is numerically identical to some such relations. Although in humans such relations are presumably instantiated in the nervous system, they could in principle be equally well instantiated in other physical systems, such as computers. Reductive functionalists typically deny that the experiences of one person could be scrambled from those of another without experimental consequences. For if conscious experiences are identical to functional relations, then to scramble experiences is to scramble the functional relations, and this would create measurable differences between the two persons in controlled experiments.” (Hoffman, The Scrambling Theorem: A Simple Proof of the Logical Possibility of Spectrum Inversion, 32) 

“At Cambridge I was indoctrinated with the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, but G.E. Moore and I together came to reject both these philosophies. I think that, although we agreed in our revolt, we had important differences of emphasis. What I think at first chiefly interested Moore was the independence of fact from knowledge and the rejection of the whole Kantian apparatus of a priori intuitions and categories, moulding experience but not the outer world. I agreed enthusiastically with him in this respect, but I was more concerned than he was with certain purely logical matters. The most important of these, and the one which has dominated all my subsequent philosophy was what I called “the doctrine of external relations.” Monists had maintained that a relation between two terms is always, in reality, composed of properties of the who separate terms and of the whole which they compose, or, in ultimate strictness, only of this last. This view seemed to me to make mathematics inexplicable. I came to the conclusion that relatedness does not imply any corresponding complexity in the related terms and is, in general, not equivalent to any property of the whole which they compose. Just after developing this view in my book on The Philosophy of Leibniz, I became aware of Peano’s work in mathematical logic, which led me to a new technique and a new philosophy of mathematics. Hegel and his disciples had been in the habit of “proving” the impossibility of space and time and matter, and generally everything that an ordinary man would believe in. Having become convinced that the Hegelian arguments against this and that were invalid, I rejected to the opposite extreme and began to believe in the reality of whatever could not be disproved—e.g. points and instants and particles and Platonic universals.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 12) [Underlining is my own]

“[In] the years from 1910 to 1914, I became interested, not only in what the physical world is, but in how we come to know it. The relation of perception to physics is a problem which has occupied me intermittently ever since that time. It is in relation to this problem that my philosophy underwent its last substantial change. I had regarded perception as a two-term relation of subject and object, as this had made it comparatively easy to understand how perception could give knowledge of something other than the subject. But under the influence of William James, I came to think this view mistaken, or at any rate an undue simplification. Sensations, at least, even those that are visual or auditory, came to seem to me not in their own nature relational occurrences. I do not, of course, mean to say that when I see something there is no relation between me and what I see; but what I do mean to say is that the relation is much more indirect than I had supposed and that everything that happens in me when I see something could, so far as its logical structure is concerned, quite well occur without there being anything outside me for me to see. This change in my opinions greatly increased the difficulty of problems involved in connecting experience with the outer world.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 13) 

“I reverse the process which has been common in philosophy since Kant. It has been common among philosophers to begin with how we know and proceed afterwards to what we know. I think this a mistake, because knowing how we know is one small department of knowing what we know. I think it a mistake for another reason: it tends to give to knowing a cosmic importance which it by no means deserves, and thus prepares the philosophical student for the belief that mind has some kind of supremacy over the non-mental universe, or even that the non-mental universe is nothing but a nightmare dreamt by mind in its un-philosophical moments. This point of view is completely remote from my imaginative picture of the cosmos. I accept without qualification the view that results from astronomy and geology, from which it would appear that there is no evidence of anything mental except a tiny fragment of space-time, and that the great processes of nebular and stellar evolution proceed according to laws in which mind plays no part.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 16) [Underlining is my own]

“The light from a star travels over intervening space and causes a disturbance in the optic nerve ending in an occurrence in the brain. What I maintain is that the occurrence in the brain is a visual sensation. I maintain, in fact, that the brain consists of thoughts—using “thought” in its widest sense, as it is used by Descartes. To this people will reply “Nonsense! I can see a brain through a microscope, and I can see that it does not consist of thoughts but of matter just as tables and chairs do.” This is a sheer mistake. What you see when you look at a brain through a microscope is a part of your private world. It is the effect in you of a long causal process starting from the brain that you say you are looking at. The brain that you say you are looking at is, no doubt, part of the physical world; but this is not the brain which is a datum in your experience. That brain is a remote effect of the physical brain. And, if the location of events in physical space-time is to be effected, as I maintain, by causal relations, then your percept, which comes after events in the eye and optic nerve leading to the brain, must be located in your brain….What I maintain is that we can witness or observe what goes on in our heads, and that we cannot witness or observe anything else at all….[The] whole of what we perceive without inference belongs to our private world. In this respect, I agree with Berkeley. The starry heaven that we know in visual sensation is inside us. The external starry heaven that we believe in is inferred.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 25-27) [Underlining is my own]

“My first philosophical book, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, which was an elaboration of my Fellowship dissertation, seems to me now somewhat foolish. I took up Kant’s question, “how is geometry possible?” and decided that it was possible if, and only if, space was one of the three recognized varieties, one of them Euclidean, the other two non-Euclidean, but having the property of preserving a constant “measure of curvature.” Einstein’s revolution swept away everything at all resembling this point of view. The geometry in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is such as I had declared to be impossible. The theory of tensors, upon which Einstein based himself, would have been useful to me, but I never heard of it until he used it. Apart from details, I do not think that there is anything valid in this early book. However, there was worse to follow. My theory of geometry was mainly Kantian, but after this I plunged into efforts at Hegelian dialectic. I wrote a paper “On the Relations of Number and Quantity” which is unadulterated Hegel….Although Couturat described the article as “ce petit chef d’oeuvre de dialectique subtile”, it seems to me now nothing but unmitigated rubbish.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 39-40) 

“I finished my book on the foundations of geometry in 1896, and proceeded at once to what I intended as a similar treatment of the foundations of physics, being under the impression that problems concerning geometry had been disposed of. I worked on the foundations of physics for two years, but the only thing that I published expressing my views at that time was the article on number and quantity already mentioned. I was at this time a full-fledged Hegelian, and I aimed at constructing a complete dialectic of the sciences, which should end up with the proof that all reality is mental. I accepted the Hegelian view that none of the sciences is quite true, since all depend upon some abstraction, and every abstraction leads, sooner or later, to contradictions. Whenever Kant and Hegel were in conflict, I sided with Hegel.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 40-41) [Underlining is my own]

“It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps. I think that the first published account of the new philosophy was Moore’s article in Mind on “The Nature of Judgement.” Although neither he nor I would now adhere to all the doctrines in this article, I, and I think he, would still agree with its negative part—i.e., with the doctrine that fact is in general independent of experience. Although we were in agreement, I think that we differed as to what most interested us in our new philosophy. I think that Moore was most concerned with the rejection of idealism, while I was most interested in the rejection of monism. The two were, however, closely connected. They were connected through the doctrine as to relations, which Bradley had distilled out of the philosophy of Hegel. I called this “the doctrine of internal relations,” and I called my view “the doctrine of external relations.” The doctrine of internal relations held that every relation between two terms expresses, primarily, intrinsic properties of the two terms and, in ultimate analysis, a property of the whole which the two compose.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 54) [Underlining is my own]

Nonsense—a total lie and blatant misrepresentation of Bradley’s views. Bradley (and Russell had to have known this at the time) rejected in toto the so-called “doctrine of internal relations.” Not only that, Bradley explicitly maintained that any attempt to arrive at an intellectually satisfactory conception of Reality as consisting in, or being a system of, relations enjoining, and enjoined to, relata (regardless of whether the relations be “internal” or “external”) is destined to end in inconsistency and ultimate failure. Unfortunately, few people today appreciate this crucial and much-overlooked aspect of Bradley’s metaphysic. (Vide Bradley’s Collected Essays, Essays on Truth and Reality, Appearance and Reality, etc.)

“I first realized the importance of the question of relations when I was working on Leibniz. I found—what books on Leibniz failed to make clear—that his metaphysic was explicitly based upon the doctrine that every proposition attributes a predicate to a subject and (what seemed to him almost the same thing) that every fact consists of a substance having a property. I found that this same doctrine underlies the systems of Spinoza, Hegel and Bradley, who, in fact, all developed the doctrine with more logical rigour than is shown by Leibniz. But it was not only these rather dry, logical doctrines that made me rejoice in the new philosophy. I felt it, in fact, as a great liberation, as if I had escaped from a hot-house on to a wind-swept headland. I hated the stuffiness involved in supposing that space and time were only in my mind. I liked the starry heavens even better than the moral law, and could not bear Kant’s view that the one I liked best was only a subjective figment. In the first exuberance of liberation, I became a naïve realist and rejoiced in the thought that grass is really green, in spite of the adverse opinion of all philosophers from Locke onwards. I have not been able to retain this pleasing faith in its pristine vigour, but I have never again shut myself up in a subjective prison. Hegelians had all kinds of arguments to prove this or that not “real.” Number, space, time, matter, were all professedly convicted of being self-contradictory. Nothing was real, so we were assured, except the Absolute, which could think only of itself since there was nothing else for it to think of and which thought eternally the sort of things that idealist philosophers thought in their books.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 61-62)  [Underlining is my own]

The irony is delicious. Russell abandons the idealism of Kant, Hegel, and Bradley—in part because of its (alleged) “stuffiness” and “subjectivity”—only to immerse himself in the palpable absurdities of physiological subjectivism. (cf. ibid, 25-27, 103) Indeed, if an impartial analyst were asked to assess the internal consistency of Russell’s doctrine of “private spaces” and “private worlds,” his insistence that sensa (e.g. patches of color, smells, textures, tastes, etc.) are the sole objects of empirical observation and “acquaintance” (i.e., the “objective accusative” of each and every perceptual event/occurrence is a sensum), and his admission that sensa are causally-dependent upon the brains and nervous systems of the organisms that happen to be “acquainted” with them, then it wouldn’t take long for our surveyor to arrive at the following conclusion: Bertrand Russell would have to answer the following question in the negative: “Is the truth of my metaphysic consistent with the fact that I know it to be true?”

“Although I have changed my opinion on various matters since those early days, I have not changed on points which, then as now, seem of most importance. I still hold to the doctrine of external relations and to pluralism, which is bound up with it. I still hold that an isolated truth may be quite true. I still hold that analysis is not falsification. I still hold that any proposition other than a tautology, if it is true, is true in virtue of a relation to fact, and that facts in general are independent of experience. I see nothing impossible in a universe devoid of experience. On the contrary, I think that experience is a very restricted and cosmically trivial aspect of a very tiny portion of the universe. On these matters my view have not changed since I abandoned the teachings of Kant and Hegel.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 62-63) [Underlining is my own]

“The primary aim of Principia Mathematica was to show that all pure mathematics follows from purely logical premises and uses only concepts definable in logical terms. This was, of course, an antithesis to the doctrines of Kant, and initially I thought of the work as a parenthesis in the refutation of “yonder sophistical Philistine,” as Georg Cantor described him, adding for the sake of further definiteness, “who knew so little mathematics”.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 74-75) 

“When I assert all values of a function Fx, the values that x can take must be definite if what I am asserting is to be definite. There must be, that is to say, some totality of possible values of x. If I now proceed to create new values defined in terms of that totality, the totality appears to be thereby enlarged and therefore the new values referring to it will refer to that enlarged totality. But, since they must be included in the totality, it can never catch up with them. The process is like trying to jump on to the shadow of your head. We can illustrate this most simply by the paradox of the liar. The liar says, “everything that I assert is false”. This is, in fact, an assertion which he makes, but it refers to the totality of his assertions and it is only by including it in that totality that a paradox results. We shall have to distinguish between propositions that refer to some totality of propositions and propositions that do not. Those that refer to some totality of propositions can never be members of that totality. We may define first-order propositions as those referring to no totality of propositions; second-order propositions, as those referring to totalities of first-order propositions; and so on, ad infinitum. Thus our liar will now have to say, “I am asserting a false proposition of the first order which is false”. But this is itself a proposition of the second order. He is thus not asserting any proposition of the first order. What he says is, thus, simply false, and the argument that it is also true collapses. Exactly the same argument applies to any proposition of higher order.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 82-83) 

“It will be found that in all the logical paradoxes there is a kind of reflexive self-reference which is to be condemned on the same ground: viz. that it includes, as a member of a totality, something referring to that totality which can only have a definite meaning if the totality is already fixed.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 83) 

“The physiologist...makes it clear that there is an elaborate causal chain from the eye to the brain and that what you see depends upon what happens in the brain.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 103) [Underlining is my own]