grey

“Grey, my dear friend, is all theory, and green the golden tree of life”
—Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s Faust: A Dramatic Poem

On knowing one can do no better

When friends asked me what I was writing this book about, I told them it was not about consciousness. After the age of 50, many neuroscientists feel they have sufficient wisdom and expertise to set about solving the problem of consciousness (whether or not they have ever done any experimental work on the topic). Being neuroscientists, they are concerned with the problem of identifying the neural correlates of consciousness and to show how subjective experience can arise from activity in a physical brain. Many solutions have been proposed, none of which have proved very satisfying. I knew I could do no better. That is why this book is not about consciousness.

—From the Epilogue of Making Up The Mind, by Chris Frith

particulars

“In my belief that a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep, I have loaded the lectures with concrete examples…”

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

weary?

“Discussions of minor problems in traditional logic are in these days generally regarded as a bore. They are commonly prefaced by an apology, and the people who chance to see such things in print, wearily remark, ‘Good Lord, yet another one!’ Such is the fashion. We are apt to forget that boredom is often the shadow cast by an enthusiasm; and that the wailing from him who is bored, is the complaint of one who can neither escape from, nor enter into, the interest which, for these very reasons, is to him so exasperatingly stale and unprofitable. This does not mean that all men are under a moral obligation to delight in what interests any one of them. But neither should the lone individual tremble at the possibility that what interests him may weary others. Rather let him state his interest plainly, and to those who fail to share it, wish a kindly ‘God speed’ as they depart.”

Roelofs, H. D. (1927). The Distribution of Terms. Mind, 36, 281-291.