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January 9 - January 14, 2022
A philosopher who asked good questions about what they were doing (instead of telling them why, in principle, their projects were impossible) was apparently such a refreshing novelty that a sterling cadre of pioneering researchers took me in, gave me informal tutorials, and sent me alerts about whom to take seriously and what to read, all the while being more forgiving of my naïve misunderstandings than they would have been had I been one of their colleagues or graduate students.
This is one of the most refreshing things about Dennett. So many philosophers who write about science and scientists believe that they don't need to know much about science. He's the exception.
The British biologist D’Arcy Thompson (1917) famously said, “Everything is the way it is because it got that way.”
Si, abbiamo un anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot! (Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots!) —Headline for an interview with me by Giulio Giorello in Corriere della Sera, Milan, 1997
When the topic of consciousness arises, the difficult task is to keep a lid on the anxieties and suspicions that seduce people—including many scientists—into distorting what we know and aiming preemptive strikes at dangerous ideas they dimly see looming.
That’s a rhetorical question, and trying to answer rhetorical questions instead of being cowed by them is a good habit to cultivate.
12I have been misidentifying this author as Robert Beverley MacKenzie for over thirty years; I thank the fact checkers at Norton for correcting my error.
This is the right way to respond when someone points out an error. Correct the error, and thank those who corrected you.
One of the facts of life, both genetic and cultural, is that options become obligatory.
Some people cling to the view that consciousness is the big exception, an all-or-nothing property that divides the universe into two utterly disjoint classes: those things it is like something to be, and those that it is not like anything to be (Nagel 1974; Searle 1992; Chalmers 1996; McGinn 1999). I have never encountered a persuasive argument for why this should be so.
Mercier and Sperber (2011) argue that the individual human being’s capacity to reason, to express and evaluate logical arguments, arises out of the social practice of persuasion, and it shows fossil traces, in effect, of this origin. The notorious confirmation bias is our tendency to highlight the positive evidence for our current beliefs and theories while ignoring the negative evidence. This and other well-studied patterns of errors in human reasoning suggest that our skills were honed for taking sides, persuading others in debate, not necessarily getting things right.
Parmenides is the philosopher who said, “There is just one thing, and I’m not it.”
My primary aim in this book isn’t to refute Gricean and neo-Gricean approaches once and for all. Griceanism is too widespread and its numerous proponents are far too varied in their individual approaches. And besides [he adds in a footnote], who needs to make that many enemies all at once? (p. 4)
free-floating rationales
Most people agree that rats can be exterminated but not their rodent cousins squirrels, who have been called rats with good PR by an insightful comedian.
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t. —Emerson M. Pugh, The Biological Origin of Human Values
As Socrates famously said, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and ever since Socrates we have taken it as self-evident that achieving an ever greater understanding of everything is our highest professional goal, if not our highest goal absolutely. But as another philosopher, the late Kurt Baier, once added, “the over-examined life is nothing to write home about either.”
