Leon Battista Alberti Quotes

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.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

Light comes to us by the sensibility. Without visual sensibility there is no light, no movement.

Sense-perceptions can only be indirect knowledge, and not direct knowledge. Only one's own awareness is direct knowledge.

The light is there, and colors surround us. However, if there were no light nor colors in our own eye, we wouldn't perceive such things outside of us.

Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?

Actually, I think most people accept the existence of qualia.

When I see a colour or hear a sound, I am aware of something, and not of nothing.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

It is still color, it is not yet light.

What is the meaning of the togetherness of the perceiving mind, in that peculiar modification of perceiving which makes it perceive not a star but a tree, and the tree itself, is a problem for philosophy.

Studying consciousness tells us more about how the world is fundamentally strange. I think we have a few revolutions to go yet before we get to the bottom of it.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Man can no more think without words than see without light.

We are astonished at thought, but sensation is equally wonderful.

People are said to believe in God, or to disbelieve in Adam and Eve. But in such cases what is believed or disbelieved is that there is an entity answering a certain description. This, which can be believed or disbelieved is quite different from the actual entity (if any) which does answer the description. Thus the matter of belief is, in all cases, different in kind from the matter of sensation or presentation, and error is in no way analogous to hallucination. A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

I discover vision, not as a 'thinking about seeing,' to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.

But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense 'red' and 'blue' any more than 'resemblance' (or 'qualities' any more than 'relations'): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that 'this is red.'

Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects.

Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.

An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared.

The percept takes priority of the concept.

The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge.