KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA32 (Muller)

Commentary 41

D'ESPAGNAT, PETITT, THOS. HUXLEY, AND MIR
by Hugh Bone
11 July 2001, posted 14 August 2001

Rummaging through old files I came across these quotes which seem relevant to various discussions of MIR, and thought you might find them interesting.

d'Espagnat: "As will be remembered, the thesis of physical realism is, schematically, the idea that nature possesses some objective reality independent of our perceptions and our means of investigation but nevertheless describable, in principle, by physics. Whoever accepts such a theory is thereby more or less unavoidably prompted to take two steps. One of them is to define physical reality to be composed of the set of all objects that are, in principle, within reach of man's experimental knowledge (directly or through the medium of theories). The other step is to assume that reality is prior to mind, since the notion of nature includes all that exists, including the mind. The objection of the philosophers in question is directed toward the upholders of such a view. It goes as follows: It is self-contradictory, they say, to assert the primacy of physical reality over mind and at the same time to define that very physical reality 'at the level of the scientific object, that is, precisely as a construct of human mind."

Thos.H.Huxley: "For after all, what do we know of this terrible "matter" except as a name for the unknown and hypothetical cause of the states of our own consciousness? And what do we know of that "spirit", of whose threatened extinction by matter a great lamentation is arising, like that which was heard at the death of Pan, except that it is also a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause, or condition of states of consciousness? In other words, matter and spirit are but names for the imaginary substrata of groups of natural phenomena." ( from a lecture given in 1868 in Edinburgh by Thos. H. Huxley)

Pettit, P.: A definition of physicalism. Physicalism is the claim that (1) There are microphysical entities, (2) Microphysical entities constitute everything, (3) There are microphysical regularities, (4) Microphysical regularities govern everything.

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Hugh Bone