The bent oar illusion

Given that we categorise illusions (e.g. the oar bent in the water) as errors on the part of perception and therefore evidence that the mind is distinct from reality, how then can we verify the falsity of the illusion (that the oar is ‘really’ straight) with the very same perceptual apparatus that dealt us the illusion in the first place? The oar is ‘really’ straight only when viewed from certain angles, and not when viewed from the end on.

Existence and non-existence

If it is true that something neither exists nor does not exist then it is not true that it does exist and does not exist.

The difference between dreaming and waking

The main difference between dreaming and waking states seems to be that in my waking state I can reflect on my dreams, and think about them from an external point of view, whereas in my dreaming state I can’t reflect on my waking thoughts in the same way.

The perception of phenomenology

What would be the ‘perception of phenomenology’?

Predicting the future

There is one thing certain about attempts to predict the future — they are always wrong. Because we can predict that the future will be quite unlike how we predict it will be it will, to this extent at least, be predictable.

The language of contemporary art

If you don’t take the trouble to learn the language of contemporary art then you can’t complain if you don’t understand what it says. At the same time if you do take the trouble, indeed if you are something of a native speaker, then you are in a position to object when what is said is banal, derivative or sterile.

Writer as reader

When I write I am also hearing myself as my reader.

Accepting paintings as they are

With the distance afforded by time you can accept a painting as it is rather than as you wanted it to be.

Distinctions and consciousness

"Were it not for this perpetual process of differentiation of self from the world, of object from its scene, of attribute from object, no step of Abstraction could be taken; no qualities could fall under our notice; and had we ten thousand senses, they would all converge and meet in but one consciousness. But if this be so, it is an utter falsification of the order of nature to speak of sensations grouping themselves into aggregates, and so composing for us the objects of which we think; and the whole language of the theory, in regard to the field of synchronous existences, is a direct inversion of the truth. Experience proceeds and intellect is trained, not by Association, but by Dissociation, not by reduction of pluralities of impression to one, but by the opening out of one into many; and a true psychological history must expound itself in analytic rather than synthetic terms. Precisely those ideas -- of Substance, of Mind, of Cause, of Space -- which this system treats as infinitely complex, the last result of myriads of confluent elements, are in truth the residuary simplicities of consciousness, whose stability the eddies and currents of phenomenal experience have left undisturbed."

Principles of Psychology by William James, 1890, p. 486.

Objects created by the mind

"That there are, in a sense, multiple objects, that one man is distinct from another man, tree from tree, stone from stone, is an indisputable fact; for each of these beings, each of these things, has characteristic properties and obeys a determined law of evolution. But the separation between a thing and its environment cannot be absolutely definite and clear cut; there is a passage by insensible gradations from the one to the other; the close solidarity which binds all the objects of the material universe, the perpetuity of their reciprocal actions and reactions, is sufficient to prove that they have not the precise limits which we attribute to them. Our perception outlines, so to speak, the form of their nucleus; it terminates them at the point where our possible action upon them ceases, where, consequently, they cease to interest our needs. Such is the primary and most apparent operation of the perceiving mind; it marks out divisions in the continuity of the extended, simply following the suggestions of our requirement and the needs of practical life. But in order to divide the real in this manner, we must first persuade ourselves that the real is divisible at will. Consequently we must throw beneath the continuity of sensible qualities, that is to say, beneath concrete extensity, a network, of which the meshes may be altered to any shape whatsoever and become as small as we please; this substratum which is merely conceived, this wholly ideal diagram of arbitrary and infinite divisibility, is homogeneous space."

Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson, p. 277 (Thanks to Alise Piebalga for the reference)