Wolfgang Ernst Pauli Quotes

You must consider, when reading this treatise, that mental perception, because connected with matter, is subject to conditions similar to those to which physical perception is subject.

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

I wanted to answer big questions about humanity, about how it is that we understand about the world, how we can know as much as we do, why human nature is the way that it is. And it always seemed to me that you find answers to those questions by looking at children.

Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception - that one perceives the world by perceiving one's sense-data, or something like that.

Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement.

In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

Gradually, at various points in our childhoods, we discover different forms of conviction. There's the rock-hard certainty of personal experience ("I put my finger in the fire and it hurt,"), which is probably the earliest kind we learn. Then there's the logically convincing, which we probably come to first through maths, in the context of Pythagoras's theorem or something similar, and which, if we first encounter it at exactly the right moment, bursts on our minds like sunrise with the whole universe playing a great chord of C Major.

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.

Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness.

The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.

To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.

For many ages it has been allowed by sensible men, Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuit prius in sensu: That is, There is nothing in the understanding which was not first perceived by some of the senses. All the knowledge which we naturally have is originally derived from our senses. And therefore those who want any sense cannot have the least knowledge or idea of the objects of that sense; as they that never had sight have not the least knowledge or conception of light or colours.

And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.

Thought is the thought of thought.

The historical order is very interesting, but accidental and capricious; if we would to understand the growth of knowledge, we cannot be satisfied with accidents, we must explain how knowledge was gradually built up.

To be is to be perceived

He who has a true idea, knows at that same time that he has a true idea, nor can he doubt concerning the truth of the thing.

The mind, in discovering truths, acts in the same manner as it acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.

The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world ... is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs.

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.

Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own.