Phenomenon Quotes - page 29
![Another useful way to avoid confusion [used by e. g. Allen Newell 1990 Unified Theories of Cognition] is to reserve the term "consciousness" for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term "awareness" for the more straightforward phenomena... If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about "consciousness" are frequently talking past each other. (David Chalmers)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/28/david-chalmers-cognition-communication-946928.webp)
In developing my account of consciousness, I have tried to obey a number of constraints. The first and most important is to take consciousness seriously. The easiest way to develop a "theory" of consciousness is to deny its existence, or to redefine the phenomenon in need of explanation as something it is not. This usually leads to an elegant theory, but the problem does not go away.
David Chalmers
The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.... The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect.... When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought.
David Chalmers
The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods. ...The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience.
David Chalmers
I was born near the Po and it is the only respectable river in all Italy. To be respectable, a river must flow through a plain because water was created to stay horizontal and only when it is perfectly horizontal does it preserve its natural dignity. Niagara falls is an embarrassing phenomenon, like a man who walks on his hands.
Giovannino Guareschi
All we know at present of locomotion is the locomotion of one piece of matter with reference to other pieces. That can be freely granted, and the whole edifice of physics is consistent with the idea that locomotion through the ether is impossible to measure. But the impossibility has never been proved, and some day an exceptional phenomenon may be found.
Oliver Lodge
The development of modern science is marked by a pronounced tendency toward indeterminism. A somewhat brutal description of this tendency may be states as follows. In relation to some phenomena, instead of trying to establish a (deterministic) functional relationship between a variable y, and some other variables x1, x2, ..., xn, we try to build a (stochastic or probabilistic) model of these phenomena, predicting frequencies with which, in specified conditions, the same variable y will assume all of its possible values.
Jerzy Neyman
Slave-owning culture ... gives rise to the teleological explanation of the Universe, which reaches its subtlest form in Plato's or Aristotle's philosophies, in which all phenomena are determined by Ideas or Forms. These correspond to the plans formed in the mind of the slave-owner which his slave passively fulfils.
Christopher Caudwell
The general aim of my book has been but to point out a way in which a solution of these numerous problems (behavior and development) can be attained. The nature of mental development as it has been revealed to us is not the bringing together of separate elements, but the arousal and perfection of more and more complicated configurations in which both the phenomena of consciousness and the functions of the organism go hand in hand.
Kurt Koffka
Scientific management consists in correct interpretation of phenomena, in exact knowledge of laws, principle and the influence of conditions upon results: and in the skilled use of methods adapted to the almost infinitely varying circumstances of individual cases
- Engineering magazine.
Herbert N. Casson
The phenomenon of the production of motion by heat has not been considered from a sufficiently general point of view. We have considered it only in machines... [for which] the phenomenon is... incomplete. It becomes difficult to recognize its principles and study its laws. ...[T]he principle of the production of motion by heat... must be considered independently of any mechanism or... particular agent. It is necessary to establish principles applicable not only to steam-engines but to all imaginable heat-engines, whatever the working substance and whatever the method by which it is operated.
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot
Thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language--shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in a language-in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
To the scientists of 1850, Hamilton's principle was the realization of a dream. ...from the time of Galileo scientists had been striving to deduce as many phenomena of nature as possible from a few fundamental physical principles. ...they made striking progress ...But even before these successes were achieved Descartes had already expressed the hope and expectation that all the laws of science would be derivable from a single basic law of the universe. This hope became a driving force in the late eighteenth century after Maupertuis's and Euler's work showed that optics and mechanics could very likely be unified under one principle. Hamilton's achievement in encompassing the most developed and largest branches of physical science, mechanics, optics, electricity, and magnetism under one principle was therefore regarded as the pinnacle of mathematical physics.
Morris Kline
Doubt about the fact that insight wholesomeness consists of simply observing the presently arising mental and physical phenomena is also skeptical doubt. This doubt is so subtle that it is rarely detected but is instead mistaken for investigation. This doubt masquerades as analytical knowledge. The commentary on Netti Yuttihāra explains as follows: "Doubt appears in the guise of investigation."
Mahasi Sayadaw
One who fails to observe mental and physical phenomena every time they arise cannot see them as merely mental and physical phenomena. Furthermore, one does not realize their causality, impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, notself, or their immediate disappearance upon arising and their continuous disappearance thereafter. Therefore, one mistakenly identifies these mental and physical phenomena with a personal entity, a person who is either born without any cause or created by a creator. One mistakes them for someone or something permanent and pleasant, everlasting, and unchanging.
Mahasi Sayadaw
War is a mass phenomenon. To penetrate the basic causes of war, we must discern the factors which have made millions of people abandon their habitual modes of life, their occupations, and their moral concepts to participate in murder and destruction. We should therefore put greater stress upon the simple conscious and. subconscious impulses which rule the behavior of the masses.
Eugene M. Kulischer
Economic liberalisation is a world phenomenon. Socialist countries, capitalist countries, all of them, have to take to liberalisation. The liberalisation took place first in Britain, then in the United States under President Reagan, these were not liberalising from a socialist system. I think it is because of the stage of economy which the world has reached at present and the stage of technology. At every historical and technological and economic age there are policies which would be suitable for that period and countries. We have to adopt policies, dictated by the circumstances and the necessities of the time.
K. R. Narayanan
We pass at once into the magnificent edifice which bears the name of Panini as its architect and which justly commands the wonder and admiration of everyone who enters, and which, by the very fact of its sufficing for all the phenomenon which language presents, bespeaks at once the marvelous ingenuity of its inventor and his profound penetration of the entire material of the language.
Pāṇini
