Worker. Abstract Theoretical Biologist. I solve problems that no one else can. [email protected]
Joined November 2015
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"In fact, the mind has also invented a craft of world-building; its familiar world is built not from the distribution of relata and relations but by its own peculiar interpretation of the code messages transmitted along the nerves into its sanctum."
"We recognise the actuality of a particular world because it is that world alone with which consciousness interacts. However much the theoretical physicist may dislike a reference to consciousness, the experimental physicist uses freely this touchstone of actuality. He would...
applying it we decide that this sorry world of ours is actual and Utopia is a dream. As our individual consciousnesses are different, so our touchstones are different; but fortunately they all agree in their indication of actuality—or at any rate those which agree are in...
"If then only pointer readings or their equivalents are put into the machine of scientific calculation, how can we grind out anything but pointer readings? But that is just what we do grind out."
-A. S. Eddington "The Nature of the Physical World" 1929 pg. 252
"And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left with only pointer readings."
-A. S. Eddington "The Nature of the Physical World" 1929 pg. 252
"We are drawing near to the great question whether there is any domain of activity—of life, of consciousness, of deity—which will not be engulfed by the advance of exact science; and our apprehension is not directed against the particular entities of physics but against all...
"[a]nd since we must cease to employ familiar concepts, symbols have become the only possible alternative.
The synthetic method by which we build up from its own symbolic elements a world which will imitate the actual behaviour of the world of familiar experience is adopted...
"We take as building material [for the construction of the world] relations and relata. The relations unite the relata; the relata are the meeting points of the relations. The one is unthinkable apart from the other. I do not think that a more general starting-point of...
"[I]n digging deeper and deeper into that which lies at the base of physical phenomena we must be prepared to come to entities which, like many things in our conscious experience, are not measurable by numbers in any way[.]"
Alex Buckley retweeted
I was the kid she’s describing. During freshman year the obvious conclusion occurred to me that school wasn't worth the effort. My teachers were nice people with warm platitudes, but they were also consumer-nihilists who had no clue. In English we read literature written for girls and in history we learned all about the evils committed by our ancestors. Class was mostly an exercise in rule-following and boredom management. The only reasonable response was to check out.
Only later did I discover, to my shock, that I liked good books, and that there were things worth pursuing, studying, knowing. So in my case (and I'm guessing I'm not alone), public schooling prevented the development of a love of learning.
