Pensive Reason

“ For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate, after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity. If any one, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me. ”

“ The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual belief of his age or nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind…. the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize… we find… that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. ”

“ There are some fairly old philosophical issues about what confers identity and uniqueness, and these are the principles, quiddity and haecceity. I hadn’t even heard of these issues until I started to research into it, and it turns out these obscure terms come from the philosopher Duns Scotus. Quiddity is the invisible properties, the essence shared by members of a group, so that would be the ‘dogginess’ of all dogs. But the haecceity is the unique property of the individual, so that would be Fido’s haecceity or Fido’s essence, which makes Fido distinct to another dog, for example. These are not real properties. These are psychological constructs, and I think the reason that people generate these constructs is that when they invest some emotional time or effort into an object, or it has some significance towards them, then they imbue it with this property, which makes it irreplaceable, you can’t duplicate it. In effect, it becomes sacred, and so I think that sacred objects, which exist across various religions, also have this notion of them being unique. You can’t duplicate and you can’t corrupt them. They have this property that is indivisible. I think essentialism is pervasive in our attitude towards objects, but it’s also there in our attitudes to valuation. ”

“ When we think of intelligent life in outer space, we also tend to display a quasi- childish naiveté that, in many respects, literally begs the question as to the kind of beings that we hope to encounter one day. We have great reverence for intelligence as the defining attribute of the human species. This is a glaring sign that ours is a physicalist age, a milieu dominated by reductionist philosophical materialism. While we stomp on genuine wisdom and ridicule those who possess it, we are taken in by the glare and glamour of what, on closer inspection, is not intelligence at all, but rather crafty affectation. This reflects our expectations of what we imagine extraterrestrials to be like. ”