"I... refer to the... Waynflete Lectures given by... E. D. Adrian, on The Physical Background of Perception because the results of physiological investigations seem... in perfect agreement with my suggestion about the meaning of reality in physics. The messages which the brain receives have not the least similarity with the stimuli. They consist in pulses of given intensities and frequencies, characteristic for the transmitting nerve-fiber, which ends in a definite place in the cortex. All the brain 'learns' (I use... the objectionable language of the 'disquieting figure of a little hobgoblin sitting... aloft in the ') is a distribution or a 'map' of pulses. From this information it produces the image of the world by a process which can metaphorically be called a consummate place of combinatorial mathematics: it sorts out of the maze of indifferent and varying signals invariant shapes and relations which form the world of ordinary experience."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from GermanyPhysicists from the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge facultyNobel laureates in PhysicsPhysicists from Germany
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 125. Link: E. D. Adrian, The Physical Background of Perception @Archive.org
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Born
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"He felt that what is called “Copenhagen interpretation” should be called “Göttingen interpretation,” and was a bit hu…"
"He [Einstein] calls my way of describing the physical world 'incomplete'; in his eyes this is a flaw which he hopes t…"
"While Born evidently realised that our extended order no longer gratified primitive instincts, he too failed to exami…"
"I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and …"
"If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in or…"
"Can we call something with which the concepts of position and motion cannot be associated in the usual way, a thing, …"
"Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the se…"
"I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g.,…"
"The continuity of our science has not been affected by all these turbulent happenings, as the older theories have alw…"
"I must give some attention to the delicate question of religion, on which I have touched already. In my father's gene…"