Michele Pasin / Quotes

Condemned to treat representations as the world

“Many people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our constitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if it were of a given and immediate world.” —Francisco Varela

Saved 27 January 2018 / www.amazon.com ↗

#representation #knowledge #experience #perception

The representative theory of perception

How do I know that the representation really represents, or represents accurately? Descartes’ view was common in the seventeenth century. It is called the…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #perception #representation #knowledge

A frog's eye is not a camera

Importantly, the frog will persist with this behaviour. It will never adapt its behaviour in light of the unsuccessful attempts to capture the fly. The moral…

Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina) #perception #representation #animals #action

We perceive only the contents of our minds

It is important to understand that on Descartes’ view we do not directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world. What we directly perceive, that…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #perception #representation #dualism

Bodies known only by inference from ideas

Bodies, on the other hand, cannot be known directly but only indirectly by inferring their existence and features from the contents of the mind. I do not…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #perception #dualism #knowledge

God is not a deceiver

assuming that God exists, he argues that God cannot be a deceiver. Because of God’s perfection, it would be inconsistent to suppose that he could be a…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #God #knowledge #skepticism #perception

Mary has never seen red

A similar argument was advanced by the Australian philosopher, Frank Jackson.2 Jackson imagines a neuro-biologist, Mary, who knows all there is to know about…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #perception #subjective-experience #knowledge #materialism