Mind

"The most profound breach in this country is not between the rich and the poor, but between the people and the intellectuals. In their view of life, the American people are predominantly Apollonian. The mainstream intellectuals are Dionysian. This means the people are reality-oriented, common sense-oriented, technology-oriented. The intellectuals call this "materialistic," and "middle-class." The intellectuals are emotion-oriented, and seek in panic an escape from a reality they are unable to deal with, and from a technological civilization that ignores their feelings."

"All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. It is a striving shot through with malice, envy, self-deception, and a host of petty impulses; yet it often culminates in superb achievements. Thus we find that people who fail in everyday affairs often show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. They become responsive to grandiose schemes, and will display unequaled steadfastness, formidable energies and a special fitness in the performance of tasks which would stump superior people. It seems paradoxical that defeat in dealing with the possible should embolden people to attempt the impossible, but a familiarity with the mentality of the weak reveals that what seems a path of daring is actually an easy way out: It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings. For when we fail in attaining the possible the blame is solely ours, but when we fail in attaining the impossible we are justified in attributing it to the magnitude of the task."

"With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves."

"Science ... cannot conceive of any means of achieving that escape from desires we call "contentment" otherwise than through the satisfaction of those desires; it has not yet learnt that there is no limit to the multiplication of desires, nor that, since different people's desires are often mutually incompatible, an indefinite multiplication of desires increases conflict as well as discontent."

"It is all escapism to feel dependent. By such an attitude you just lame yourself... The right way is your own way, and you should make yourself go on that way."

"The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion.""

"And this is the whole shabby secret: to some men, the sight of an achievement is a reproach, a reminder that their own lives are irrational, and that there is no loophole - no escape from reason and reality. Their resentment is the cornered Dionysian element baring its teeth."

"Men cannot, for Nietzche, escape time. It is the effort to remove oneself from history which Nietzche sees at the root of the various attempts at redemption: Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, along with the Christians before them and science after, all maintain the existence of a world of transcendental concept(s) (be this God, theoretical reason, the Geist, the laws of physics), as the source for a solution to the problems of earthly being. "Redemption" consists of escaping from this world to that one, or, conversely, having that world take this one over. Given, however, Nietzche's general hostility to such notions of transcendence and two-worldliness, it is unlikely that he would assert the possibility or desirability of escaping the reality of time."

"The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

"I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is to escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity. ... Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. That is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience."

"They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. But the man that is shall shadow The man that pretends to be."

"A horse is the projection of peoples' dreams about themselves - strong, powerful, beautiful - and it has the capability of giving us escape from our mundane existence."

"... mathematics is the science of skillful operations with concepts and rules invented just for this purpose. The principal emphasis is on the invention of concepts. Mathematics would soon run out of interesting theorems if these had to be formulated in terms of the concepts which already appear in the axioms. Furthermore, whereas it is unquestionably true that the concepts of elementary mathematics and particularly elementary geometry were formulated to describe entities which are directly suggested by the actual world, the same does not seem to be true of the more advanced concepts, in particular the concepts which play such an important role in physics."

"Bhikkhus, this Kassapa is content with any kind of almsfood, and he speaks in praise of contentment with any kind of almsfood, and he does not engage in a wrong search, in what is improper, for the sake of a almsfood. If he does not get almsfood he is not agitated, and if he gets it he uses it without being tied to it, uninfatuated with it, not blindly absorbed in it, seeing the danger in it, understanding the escape. ... Therefore, bhikkhus, you should train yourselves thus: 'We will be content with any kind of almsfood, and we will speak in praise of contentment with any kind of almsfood, and we will not engage in a wrong search, in what is improper, for the sake of almsfood. If we do not get almsfood we will not be agitated, and if we get it we will use it without being tied to it, uninfatuated with it, not blindly absorbed in it, seeing the danger in it, understanding the escape."

"What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone."

"The logical acts of the understanding by which concepts are generated as to their form are: 1. comparison, i.e., the likening of mental images to one another in relation to the unity of consciousness; 2. reflection, i.e., the going back over different mental images, how they can be comprehended in one consciousness; and finally 3. abstraction or the segregation of everything else by which the mental images differ... In order to make our mental images into concepts, one must thus be able to compare, reflect, and abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are essential and general conditions of generating any concept whatever. For example, I see a fir, a willow, and a linden. In firstly comparing these objects, I notice that they are different from one another in respect of trunk, branches, leaves, and the like; further, however, I reflect only on what they have in common, the trunk, the branches, the leaves themselves, and abstract from their size, shape, and so forth; thus I gain a concept of a tree."

"[H]ow free are we in choosing the concepts for formulating our questions? Any scientific work can only be defined by formulating the questions... But in order to formulate the questions we need concepts by which we hope to get hold of the phenomena. These concepts are usually taken from the past history of science; they suggest already a possible picture of the phenomena. But if we are going to enter into a new realm of phenomena, these concepts may act as a collection of prejudices, which hamper progress... Even then we have to use concepts, and we can't help falling back on those given to us by tradition."

"Concepts, like individuals, have their histories, and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals."

"Kant says that concept without percepts are empty, percepts without concepts are blind; it would perhaps be truer to say that concepts and percepts are inseparable; and if torn asunder, they are nothing."

"We may come back to the more general question, what one should consider as the characteristic features of such a closed system of axioms and definitions. Perhaps the most important feature is the possibility of finding a consistent mathematical representation for it. This representation must guarantee that the system does not contain contradictions. Then the system must be suited to describe a wide field of experience. The great variety of phenomena in the field should correspond to the great number of solutions to the equations in the mathematical representation. The limitations of the field can generally not be derived from the concepts. The concepts are not sharply defined in their relation to nature, in spite of the sharp definition of their possible connections. The limitation will therefore be found from experience, from the fact that the concepts do not allow a complete description of the observed phenomena."

"[W]hen we set out to apply... an idealized term, the operative question is not whether actual instances exist in reality to be designated by the new term. Rather, the question is, on what conditions the new idealized concept has any empirical relevance, and how it succeeds in throwing light, both on those situations to which it directly applies, and on those to which it does not. No actual object exemplifies with unlimited precision the mathematician's specification for a 'geometrical point' or 'Euclidean straight line', no real-life material system fully answers to the physical definition of a 'rigid body' or ; no human being conforms unfailingly to the judicial ideal of a 'reasonable man'; nor are there any absolutely perfect instances of the economist's 'free market'. Yet this leaves the explanatory significance of such idealized concepts unaffected and undiminished. Theoretically speaking, indeed, they can be just as revealing in negative as in positive cases. When we consider, for instance, why departs from the physicist's ideal of a 'perfect gas' more strikingly than oxygen, or when we discuss the conditions on which the workings of an can approximate to those of a 'free' market, it is the explanatory fruits of the concepts that matter, not their exemplifications."

"Abstraction"

"The foolish read to escape reality; the wise surrender to it."

"I believe that the first step in the setting of a "real external world" is the formation of the concept of bodily objects... Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impressions... and we correlate to them a concept—the concept of a bodily object. Considered logically, this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is a free creation of the human (or animal) mind. ...by means of such concepts and mental relations between them, we are able to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of sense impressions. These notions and relations, although free mental creations, appear to us stronger and more unalterable than the individual sense experience itself, the character of which... is never completely guaranteed."

"Concepts can only acquire content when they are connected, however indirectly, with sensible experience. But no logical investigation can reveal this connection; it can only be experienced. ...this connection ...determines the cognitive value of systems of concepts."

"The aim of science is... a comprehension, as complete as possible, of the connection between the sense experiences in their totality, and... the accomplishment of this aim by the use of the minimum of primary concepts and relations."

"Concepts have meaning only if we can point to objects to which they refer and to rules by which they are assigned to these objects."

"The belief in an external world independent of the percipient subject is the foundation of all science. But since our sense-perceptions inform us only indirectly of this external world, or Physical Reality, it is only by speculation that it can become comprehensible to us. From this it follows that our conceptions of Physical Reality can never be definitive; we must always be ready to alter them, that is, [to alter] the axiomatic basis of physics, in order to take account of the facts of perception with the greatest possible logical completeness."

"All concepts, even those which are closest to experience, are from the point of view of logic freely chosen conventions."

"Often it is only after immense intellectual effort, which may have continued over centuries, that humanity at last succeeds in achieving knowledge of a concept in its pure form, by stripping off the irrelevant accretions which veil it from the eye of the mind."

"Conceptual model"

"Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom." It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?"

"Shakespeare's final Exeunts order us out of the theater because the unfinished business they leave us with cannot be transacted there. ... What stage death offers the hero is an escape from this verbal dying into the rest that is silence. ...a critique of this commitment to stageable closure as an escape from meaning. ... This critique speaks to the ethical limits of such notions as Aristotle's circumscribed concept of courage, the courage that thinks to prove itself by facing death in battle as "the most terrible thing of all." ...Aristotle limits the range of the term according to the doctrine of the mean: "to seek death in order to escape from poverty, or the pangs of love, or from pain or sorrow, is not the act of a courageous man, but rather of a coward; for it is weakness to fly from troubles, and the suicide does not endure death because it is noble to do so, but to escape evil." But the interest, pathos, and poignancy of Shakespear's warrior-heroes is produced by ignoring this distinction."

"Chorus: Let not thy love to man o'erleap the bounds Of reason, nor neglect thy wretched state: So my fond hope suggests thou shalt be free From these base chains, nor less in power than Jove. Prometheus: Not thus—it is not in the that thus These things should end; crush'd with a thousand wrongs, A thousand woes, I shall escape these chains. Necessity is stronger far than art. Chorus: Who then is ruler of necessity? Prometheus: The triple Fates and unforgetting Furies. Chorus: Must Jove then yield to their superior power? Prometheus: He no way shall escape his destined fate."

"Man’s basic anxiety … drives the anxious subject to establish objects of fear. Anxiety strives to become fear, because fear can be met by courage. … Horror is ordinarily avoided by the transformation of anxiety into fear of something, no matter what. The human mind is not only, as Calvin has said, a permanent factory of idols, it is also a permanent factory of fears—the first in order to escape God, the second in order to escape anxiety. … But ultimately the attempts to transform anxiety into fear are vain. The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself."

"A systematic revolution of basic concepts begins with Einsteinian science. In the very detail of its concepts a relativism of the rational and the empirical is established. Science then undergoes what Nietzche called "an upheaval of concepts," as if the earth, the universe, things, possessed a different structure from the fact that their explanation rests upon new foundations. All rational organization is "shaken" when the fundamental concepts undergo dialectical transformation."

"There are three aspects of thinking as more or less complete stages of it. These are, conception, judgment, and reasoning. They are not to be considered three distinct acts; not even three successive stages. No one of them could occur without each of the others."

"Conception is taking together into one idea the element of meaning common to a number of objects and things. ...Conception is... the simplest act of thinking; it is the apprehension of the universal, as perception is the apperception of the particular. We perceive this man; we conceive man. ...it is universal through its ideal element, or what it points to, not from its existence."

"Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as “necessities of thought,” “a priori givens,” etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, replaced by others if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason."

"Self-awareness is a complex, but carefully constructed illusion: we rightly place high value on the work of those mental agencies that appear able to reflect on the behavior of other agencies—especially our linguistic and ego-structure mechanisms."

"The principal way that cognitive science can contribute to epistemology, I claim, is to identify basic belief-forming, or problem-solving processes. Once identified, these processes would be examined by primary epistemology according to the evaluative dimensions and standards adduced in Part I."

"With the hubris common to physicists, I have always felt that I have known what good science is — it is theory cast in terms of mechanisms that describe how parts of the universe behave. With sometimes immense historical delay, these mechanisms always move towards being grounded in the larger mechanistic view of the universe. Theories always propose a view of how the universe is. They can never be effectively argued to be true, but only be brought before the bar of empirical evidence. All the modern concern for contextualism, hermeneutics and the social determination of meaning has its point, but is a mere footnote to the massive evidence for this view of science. The overwhelming success within this framework of modern biology over the last half century has provided another major confirmation, if one is needed. Someday we will get another striking confirmation from cognitive science. Though it can be argued that we are well on our way, we still have an immense distance to go. Arguments are no match for the evidence that cognitive science does not control its subject the way physics, chemistry and now biology do."

"Good design is a Renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something."

"Cognitive science [is] the interdisciplinary field of study of the approach systems and processes that manipulate information."

"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."

"Cognitive introspective psychology and related cognitive science can no longer be ignored experimentally, or written off as "a science of epiphenomena", nor either as something that must, in principle, reduce eventually to neurophysiology. The events of inner experience, as emergent properties of brain processes, become themselves explanatory causal constructs in their own right, interacting at their own level with their own laws and dynamics. The whole world of inner experience (the world of the humanities) long rejected by 20th century scientific materialism, thus becomes recognized and included within the domain of science."

"If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent"

"Cognitive processes surely exist, so it can hardly be unscientific to study them."

"An essential part of the awakening is the recognition of the unawakened you, the ego as it thinks, speaks and acts, as well as the recognition of the collectively conditioned mental processes that perpetuate the unawakened state. That is why this book shows the main aspects of the ego and how they operate in the individual as well as in the collective. This is important for two related reasons: The first is that unless you know the basic mechanics behind the workings of the ego, you won’t recognize it, and it will trick you into identifying with it again and again."

"In conceptual art the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive; it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman."