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| 24208 | Bodies classify things prior to thought (such as chicks knowing what hits of the egg to peck) |
| Full Idea: The body classifies things in the world before there is any thought. (Example: the chick leaving the egg distinguished what is to be pecked and what not). | |||
| From: Simone Weil (Lect 1: Materialist Viewpoint [1933], p.31) | |||
| A reaction: Good. It is an absurd mistake to think that classification could be exclusively human, or (even worse) exclusively verbal. How do animals cope with the world? |
| 24209 | Senses are unaware of each other, and give isolated information |
| Full Idea: None of the senses tells us that there are other senses. None of the senses tells us how the sensations it gives are related to those that are given by the other senses. | |||
| From: Simone Weil (Lect 1: Materialist Viewpoint [1933], p.43) | |||
| A reaction: That is quite striking, but it is obviously a mistake (even a category error) to think that the senses should in themselves be aware of anything. This helps to clarify their role. So we don't just know something by seeing it. |
| 24211 | Associations are not lawlike, because we make arbitrary choice of which representation matters |
| Full Idea: The so called laws of association are not laws really because, if we follow them, every representation can bring in its train whatever representation we choose, the choice of one rather than the other remains unexplained. | |||
| From: Simone Weil (Lect 1: Materialist Viewpoint [1933], p.63) | |||
| A reaction: I suppose if you saw several representations or contiguities simultaneously you would face this situation. It doesn't seem plausible that there are 'laws' of association, but something like it obviously occurs. |
| 24210 | Abstraction is just the character of generalisation |
| Full Idea: The problem of abstraction is exactly the same as that of general ideas. We call what characterises general ideas abstract. | |||
| From: Simone Weil (Lect 1: Materialist Viewpoint [1933], p.59) | |||
| A reaction: Note that is not general ideas which are abstract, but what 'characterises' them. Is resemblance an intermediate step between generalisation and abstraction? The concepts seem to develop in stages. |
| 24212 | We don't infer the straight from the twisted, because judging the twisted needs the straight |
| Full Idea: The materialist says: it is by means of a series of straight lines that one imagines the perfect straight line as an ideal limit. But the progression itself contains what is infinite. It is in relation to the straight that we say a line is less twisted. | |||
| From: Simone Weil (Lect 1: Materialist Viewpoint [1933], p.87) | |||
| A reaction: This is the platonist response to my preferred view that the mind produces all the pure concepts such as idealisations. I prefer to refer to pulling a rope, where the straight emerges as an obvious observed limit. |
| 24207 | Observing oneself in the present is impossible, and oneself in the past may be wrong |
| Full Idea: If one tries to observe oneself in the present one finds in oneself only the state of observing oneself. Introspection, then, can only work in the case of past states of mind, …about which one can always be mistaken. | |||
| From: Simone Weil (Lect 1: Materialist Viewpoint [1933], p.28) | |||
| A reaction: I don't think this is wholly correct. We can become self-aware for a moment while absorbed in something else, and have some insight into what the absorption was like. Some aspects of past experience can be known accurately. |