Reading Notes: March 9th, 2023

“That which sees all is not to be seen; that which hears all is not to be heard; that which knows all is not to be known; that which discerns all is not to be discerned.” (Oupnek’hat, Vol. I, 202) 

“He sees, but he can’t be seen, he hears, but he can’t be heard; he thinks, but he can’t be thought of; he perceives, but he can’t be perceived.” (The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad, 3.7.23) 

“Just as one’s eyes are not a part of one’s visual field (Wittgenstein, Tractatus), so is one’s brain (without the aid of an autocerebroscope) not part of the world perceived” (Feigl, Some Crucial Issues of Mind-Body Monism, 306) [The italics are mine] 

“The doctrine which I defend, then, may be encapsulated in the slogan: mental processes are nothing but a certain sort of physical process in the brain.” (Armstrong, Epistemological Foundations for a Materialist Theory of the Mind, 180) 

“Direct Realism answers that the immediate object of awareness is never anything but a physical existent, which exists independently of the awareness of it.” (Armstrong, Perception and the Physical World, xi) 

“Objects have an indefinite number of characteristics….It is a logically necessary truth that if a physical object exists it is determinate in all its characteristics….The objects and properties of objects that are immediately perceived have an existence logically independent of their being perceived. There are objects and properties of objects that are never perceived, although it would always be logically possible for such unperceived things to be perceived.” (Armstrong, Perception and the Physical World, 25, 60, 192) 

“Perception is a causal affair. If somebody perceives something, then it is involved in the perception; it is even involved in the concept of perception: that the thing perceived acts upon the perceiver, causing the perception of the object.” (Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, and Other Essays, 62) 

“‘Objection-perception’ statements are statements like, “Jones saw a (the) fox.” Their general form is “A perceives O.” But the object perceived need not be an object in any narrow sense of the word. “The child saw the march-past” counts as an object-perception statement, although the march-past would be normally classed as an event or happening, not as an object. It is an essential feature of object-perception statements that they entail that the object perceived has existence. If Jones saw a fox, then, of necessity, there was a fox there to see. “A perceived O” entails “O existed”….But although object-perception statements entail that the thing perceived exists, they do not entail that the perceiver knows, or truly believes or even has the thought that the object perceived exists. Nor need the object perceptually appear to him to be the object that it in fact is….The fact is that object-perception statements are hardly cognitive idioms at all. This is connected with the fact that the argument-form: (1) A perceives O, (2) O = P, ∴ (3) A perceives P is a valid form. If A sees a table, and the table is a cloud of fundamental particles, then A sees a cloud of fundamental particles, although A be the most ignorant peasant in the world.” (Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, and Other Essays, 62) 

“It is necessary first to consider more deeply the nature of object-perception statements. It is widely, and I believe correctly, accepted among contemporary philosophers that such statements entail that O is the cause of those perceptions of A that constitute his perceiving of O.” (Armstrong, The Nature of Mind, and Other Essays, 126) 

“The Functionalist agrees with the Identity Theorist that every individual mental state/event (every mental “token,” as we say) is identical with some physiological state/event token; but she/he denies the Identity Theorist’s implication that for every type of mental state/event, there is a corresponding physiological type of state/event.” (Lycan, The Identity Theory and Functionalism, 3) 

“There is no scientific evidence for the existence of an immortal soul, in either our own species or any other species. There is, on the other hand, a growing body of scientific data which indicates that all animals, including ourselves, can for most, and perhaps even all, purposes be regarded as organic machines, devoid of anything mystical.” (Cotterill, No Ghost in the Machine, 7) 

“There is no field of experience which cannot, in principle, be brought under some form of scientific law, and no type of speculative knowledge about the world which it is, in principle, beyond the power of science to give. We have already gone some way to substantiate this proposition by demolishing metaphysics; and we shall justify it to the full in the course of this book. With this we complete the overthrow of speculative philosophy. We are now in a position to see that the function of philosophy is wholly critical.” (Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 47) 

“We have a least a partial experience of our own bodies, but we do not generally perceive our brains at all. It is clear, however, that that is not impossible. It is merely contingent that we do not do so. The following science-fiction thought-experiment makes this plain enough. Suppose that in the future we found it advantageous (perhaps for security reasons) to take our brains out of our bodies, and keep them in a vat of nutrient fluid, connecting them to our body’s nervous system by wi-fi. In such a case it would be possible for me to examine my own brain as it lay sitting before me on the desk. My own brain would become one more among the many other objects within my experience. I could see it, touch it, or smell it, as well as apply to it more sophisticated modes of perceptual extension, such as monitoring its blood flow levels or recording its electro-chemical activity.” (Mander, Idealism, Narrative and the Mind-Brain Relation, 2) 

“Now, seeing the general resemblance between the conception of life and the conception of consciousness, are we not to infer an essential similarity in their origin? Can we associate consciousness with the reactions of any specific material substance, as we associate life with the reactions of protoplasm? We most certainly can. Every modern psychologist agrees that consciousness stands in special relation to the functions of the nervous system. What we call consciousness appears on the objective side as the activity of certain portions of the brain. Specific physico-chemical reactions of nerve-tissue are an invariable aspect of all forms of consciousness. I propose, indeed, to show later that these specific reactions actually are consciousness, in precisely the same way that the specific reactions of protoplasm actually are life.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 101-102) 

“What is a state of consciousness? The untrained mind will, of course, immediately hypostatize it, and call it a thing. Let us, however, call it a process, and instead of regarding it as a thin and shadowy accompaniment of certain cerebral processes, let us boldly identify it with those processes, and say that it is one and the same. Immediately all difficulties vanish. You affirm that you move your arm by an act of will; I affirm that you move it by a cerebral process. We are both right; for the act of will is the cerebral process itself.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 122) 

“It seems to the ordinary observer that nothing can be more remotely and widely separated than some so-called “act of consciousness” and a material object. An act of consciousness or mental process is a thing of which we are immediately and indubitably aware: so much I admit. But that it differs in any sort of way from a material process, that is to say, from the ordinary transformations of matter and energy, is a belief which I very strenuously deny, and which I propose to discuss and elucidate at length in my final chapter.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 143) 

“In passing, I may point out the difference here disclosed between modern scientific materialism and the crude materialism of the ancients. They agree in declaring the uniformity of law; they agree in denying the doctrine of teleology; they agree that all existences are of a material character. But they disagree in their treatment of the alleged spiritual and unseen world. The ancient materialists believed to a certain extent in an unseen world; they believed even in the existence of souls. They asserted their materialism only by the theory that these entities were material in character. Democritus conceived the soul as consisting of smooth, round, material particles. The scientific materialist of to-day does not believe in any separate existence of this kind whatever. He regards what is called soul or mind as identical with certain physical processes passing in a material brain, processes of which the ancient Greeks knew nothing, and, indeed, which are still entirely unknown to all who have not acquired some smattering of physiology.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 144-145)

“Mind is neural activity; matter is associated sensation.” (Elliot, Modern Science and Materialism, 210) 

“Motion is an effect by which a body either changes, or has a tendency to change, its position: that is to say, by which it successively corresponds with different parts of space, or changes its relative distance to other bodies. It is motion alone that establishes the relation between our senses and exterior or interior beings: it is only by motion that these beings are impressed upon us—that we know their existence—that we judge of their properties—that we distinguish the one from the other—that we distribute them into classes. The beings, the  substances, or the various bodies of which Nature is the assemblage, are themselves effects of certain combinations or causes which become causes in their turn. A cause is a being which puts another in motion, or which produces some change in it. The effect is the change produced in one body, by the motion or presence of another. Each being, by its essence, by its peculiar nature, has the faculty of producing, is capable of receiving, has the power of communicating, a variety of motion Thus some beings are proper to strike our organs; these organs are competent to receiving the impression, are adequate to undergoing changes by their presence. Those which cannot act on any of our organs, either immediately and by themselves, or mediately by the intervention of other bodies, exist not for us; since they can neither move us, nor consequently furnish us with ideas: they can neither be known to us, nor of course be judged by us. To know an object, is to have felt it; to feel it, it is requisite to have been moved by it. To see, is to have been moved, by something acting on the visual organs; to hear, is to have been struck, by something on our auditory nerves. In short, in whatever mode a body may act upon us, whatever impulse we may receive from it, we can have no other knowledge of it than by the change it produces in us.” (Holbach, The System of Nature: Or, The Laws of the Moral and Physical World, 15-16)