You cannot see things until you know roughly what they are.

C.S. Lewis - Out of the Silent Planet

Because we don’t understand the brain very well we’re constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. (What else could it be?) And I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and now, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.

- John R. Searle

Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings.

- W.H. Auden

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

- Robert Frost

Questions show the mind’s range, and answers its subtlety.

- Joseph Joubert

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

- John Steinbeck

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

- Nietzsche

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

- Edmund Burke

A library is thought in cold storage.

- Herbert Samuel

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

- George Orwell

Doubt everything at least once, even the proposition that two times two equals four.

- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you , opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

- Henry David Thoreau

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.

- Thomas Pynchon

To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers - or both.

- Elizabeth Charles

Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven.

- Edward De Bono

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

- Aristotle

copied from entry on 2/23/2000:

Logic ≈ Deductive Thinking

• it can only work within a given set of rules.
• it cannot prove anything, it can only disprove.

My definition of “Rationalism” - the theory that Reason is able to recognize absolute truth, and that it is the only function of the mind which is able to do so (NOT Logic or sensory perception).

It is possible to conceive of something logically, yet unreasonably.

Reason ≈ Inductive Thinking

• intuition?
• cannot prove anything
• what “makes sense”

It is impossible to conceive of something that is reasonable, yet illogical.

• Logic is a function of Reason. Therefore, Reason is not accountable or obedient to Logic.
• No thoughts are “irrational”. That would imply that there is no reason for why we have these thoughts.
• Reason is founded upon absolutes.
• Counter-rational thinking is possible because we can conceive of things that are contrary to absolute truths.
• There may be absolute contradictions to absolute truths. But Logic, insofar as it operates exclusively on a deductive level, can never reveal anything but apparent contradictions.
• Correlate: Logic can never disprove a rational concept.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging. It is the skin of living thought.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

copied from journal entry dated 2/7/2000, 1:45 AM

I really wish these things wouldn’t strike me so forcefully at such inopportune times. If I don’t write it down now it will be gone in the morning.

A Theory on the Mind

1. A Collective/Comprehensive Philosophy

• Made up of memories, data, observations, etc., as well as established/accepted beliefs.
• Dinstinct and detached from emotion.
• Contains elements that we have forgotten or are unaware of as well as those that can be recalled by the conscious.

2. The Animal - like Freud’s “unconscious” in some ways.

• source of all emotions, drives, desires, etc…
• distinct from all moral/value judgments
• basic instincts of man qua man
• not governed by logic/reason or conscience

3. The Conscious/Operative Philosophy

• seat of logic/reason
• the part of us that is able to call up or access data from the Collective.
• competes with the Animal for control of actions 
• possibly the seat of morality (the Conscience)
  • Problem: There may be things that logic tells us are ok, in view of our comprehensive philosophy, that our consience still tells us are wrong. Therefore the Conscience may be another part.
• able to shut itself down (or are we able to shut it down?) almost completely.  Not all the way. Therefore we can operate by the Animal instead.

 

Enough for now - I need some sleep!

 

This entry was where I first started trying to work on my Comprehensive Philosophy project. It’s not anything like a solid or coherent, developed theory - just at attempt to get down a sketch of some ideas while I had a moment of clarity. My understanding of these things has developed and changed significantly since this point, but I think there is still some useful stuff in here.