Sweet Nothings
People acknowledge that a "sweet nothing" is a "nothing"; it has no content. So how can it be considered sweet?
We may not know how to answer [the questions above], but their significance--and, what is more, their fundamental importance--can scarcely be open to doubt.And another on page 452:
I think I know that our situation is at least roughly as I have described it up to this point.BTW, what is he so sure of? That realism is false! He's so sure that we have "selves" that are not part of the natural world. He's so sure that looking into a person's eyes is not a physical process. He's so sure that his favorite school of philosophy (German Idealism) is correct. How sad and parochial!
Throughout my life I have believed that I knew when I was doing wrong. The problem in those cases has not been knowing what was right but doing it.Throughout the book Magee makes one thing especially clear: he loves philosophy. He is curious. He has questions and he wants answers. He loves to learn new things. He cares about creating knowledge.
According to the laws of physics nothing comes out of anyone's eyes at all. Light rays go into the eye, and cause all sorts of things to happen inside a person, such as seeing and headaches, but there is nothing at all that comes out of the eye into the surrounding space. According to all the scientific knowledge we have, what I see when I look into someone's eyes is the light from the surrounding air reflected back to me from the surfaces of the person's eyeballs, and that light is outside the person, the light in the air around us coming back at me again. If it is dark I cannot see the person: it is only by the surrounding light that I see the surfaces of his eyeballs, with whatever degree of clarity that allows. And that, according to science, is the whole of the situation. But who actually believes it? Who can believe it? The truth of which most of us have indubitable experience every day is that when I look into another person's eyes I am in what is for the most part a reliable degree of contact with multitudinous things going on inside that person--and he with multitudinous things going on inside me: feelings, moods, thoughts, intentions, hesitations, doubts, fears, hopes, and a host of other highly variegated inner states, together with attempts to conceal or dissemble any or all of those, most of it fleeting and flashing past in flickering instants of time, and the whole of it nuanced and inflected in subtle and sophisticated ways. Is there anyone who believes that this staunchless two-way flow of information is physically encoded on the surfaces of our eyeballs in a way that changes multitudinously instant by instant like a flow of orchestral sound (if so, how is it encoded?) and read off in the surrounding light by observers who instantly and accurately decode it in what is at both ends an essentially computing process? I have yet to hear of such a person.I am such a person.
most people tend either to believe that all reality is in principle knowable or to believe that there is a religious dimension to things. A third alternative--that we can know very little but have equally little ground for religious belief--receives scant consideration, and yet seems to me to be where the truth lies. Simple though it is, people have difficulty getting their minds round it.
[Bertrand Russell] believed that mathematics was a body of knowledge about reality until the young Wittgenstein convinced him that mathematical truths were tautologies.
if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.Myth of the Framework page 125:
Avoidance of war is ... the overriding problem of public policy ... In this context it should be stated very clearly that one of the most disturbing aspects of recent events is the cult of violence. We all know that one of the most horrible aspects of our entertainment industry is the constant propaganda for violence, from allegedly harmless Westerns and crime stories to displays of cruelty pure and simple. It is tragic to see that this propaganda has had its effects even on genuine artists and scientists, and unfortunately also on our students (as the cult of revolutionary violence shows).