Reading Notes: July 12th, 2024

“The ignorant physicist sometimes says, “We know that there is matter. Why need we go further to an unknown something called mind?” But his very assertion is self-destructive. It implies the priority of the something knowing to the something known. He has not been able to assert matter without postulating mind. You not only can not prove matter, you can not define it, without implying the existence of mind.” (Krauth, The Strength and Weaknesses of Idealism, 294)

“The murder of matter is the suicide of mind.” (Krauth, The Strength and Weaknesses of Idealism, 301)

“No purely physiological investigation can explain the phenomena of consciousness….How it is that molecular changes in the brain cells coincide with modifications of consciousness; how, for instance, the vibrations of light falling on the retina excite the modification of consciousness termed a visual sensation, is a problem which cannot be solved. We may succeed in determining the exact nature of the molecular changes which occur in the brain cells when a sensation is experienced, but this will not bring us one whit nearer the explanation of the ultimate nature of that which constitutes the sensation. One is objective and the other subjective, and neither can be expressed in terms of the other. We cannot say that they are identical, or even that the one passes into the other; but only, as Laycock expresses it, that the two are correlated, or, with Bain, that the physical changes and the psychical modifications are the objective and subjective sides of a ‘double-faced unity’….The physiological activity of the brain is not, however, altogether co-extensive with its psychological functions. The brain as an organ of motion and sensation, or presentative consciousness, is a single organ composed of two halves; the brain as an organ of ideation, or re-presentative consciousness, is a dual organ, each hemisphere complete in itself. When one hemisphere is removed or destroyed by disease, motion and sensation are abolished unilaterally, but mental operations are still capable of being carried on in their completeness through the agency of the one hemisphere. The individual who is paralyzed as to sensation and motion by disease of the opposite side of the brain (say the right), is not paralyzed mentally, for he can still feel and will and think, and intelligently comprehend with the one hemisphere. If these functions are not carried on with the same vigour as before, they at least do not appear to suffer in respect of completeness.” (Ferrier, The Functions of the Brain, 256-257) 

“Davidson’s account of subjectivity (or ‘the subjective’) as first-person authority is, we believe, a cause of a philosopher simply being blind to subjectivity as a question in its own right. His point is that once we get rid of the idea of subjectivity as a ‘parade of objects before the mind’ (the Cartesian idea), all that remains is privacy and asymmetry, and these can be explained as a mere side effect of natural language in our minds. Whereas Davidson officially intends to account for ‘the subjective’, and in investigating the possibility of truth and objective knowledge for beings such as ourselves, sets out relating the objective, the intersubjective and the subjective, the fact is, his whole approach rests on the priority of a third-person perspective, and takes behavioural evidence as touchstone (even considering that the appeal to the intersubjective in his last writings aims at taking distance from Quinean-like behaviorism, itself undoubtably an even more radically third-personal approach). Still, Davidson’s overall view of subjectivity as first-person authority in linguistic creatures amounts to an elimination of subjectivity and a trivialization of the problem of self-knowledge.” (Miguens and Preyer, Are There Blindspots in Thinking About Consciousness and Subjectivity?, 13)

“Nature teaches me by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst, etc., that I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but that I am besides so intimately conjoined, and, as it were, intermixed with it, that my mind and body compose a certain unity. For if this were not the case I should not feel pain when my body is hurt, seeing I am merely a thinking thing, but should perceive the wound by the understanding alone, just as a pilot perceives by sight that part of his vessel is damaged.” (Descartes, Meditations, VI, 336)