“Conscious experience is not spooky or mysterious. It is part of the natural order.“
The Nature of Reality, Chapter 1, p. 4
“When we see a woman sitting with her head in her hands at a park bench, it is not her physical appearance that concerns us. What is evident through empathy that is not visible to our physical eyes is this person’s inner experience. She may be experiencing heartache or grief and be in utter agony, but if we take her physical appearance to be the sum total of reality, this truth will not be visible to us. While we know that this outer, physical reality is governed by laws, what has not yet occurred to us is that the inner, subjective reality might also be.”
“As opposed to the nature of quanta, qualia requires an observer.“
Feeling and the Sense of Touch, Chapter 9, p. 92
The duality between the intuitive and rational is closely related to the duality between the qualitative and the quantitative. Quantitative data (sometimes called “quanta”) is numeric, countable, and discrete. Because it is “quantized”—with clearly defined units—it can be dealt with mathematically. Qualitative data (sometimes called “qualia”) is indiscrete, sensory, and intuitive. It has a nature that is better understood from the “inside-out,” from the frame of reference of the observer. As opposed to the nature of quanta, qualia requires an observer.
Feeling and the Sense of Touch, Chapter 9, p. 92
“In the hands of a disembodied intellect, all forms are made perfect.”
The Ideal and The Actual, Chapter 10, p. 106
“These idealizations are quite natural to the imagination and to the intellect. In the hands of a disembodied intellect, all forms are made perfect. A square is perfectly square. A circle perfectly round. A line perfectly straight. Why should it “invent” imperfection when it is not there in its own space? This perfection serves to derive the most general principle of a thing, and in that way, it is very useful. But when we move from the general to the specific, we begin to get into problems with our idealizations and generalizations.”
The Ideal and The Actual, Chapter 10, p. 106
“One of the clearest ways physical biology is affected by subjective experience is memory.”
DNA and Identity, Chapter 12, p. 126
“Memory is an incredible feature of living things that makes them dynamic and adaptable. It ensures that an organism can use information from past experiences to inform its future decisions, whether to ensure its survival or to improve its quality of life. That experience can affect behavior through memory is a core quality of living things that is absent from inorganic matter. We cannot say that an oxygen atom “experienced” separation from hydrogen in a chemical reaction and therefore later avoided hydrogen. This is one of the main differences between organic and purely mechanical systems. Living systems can remember.”
DNA and Identity, Chapter 12, p. 128
“The world of divided objects descends from wholeness.“
The Whole and The Parts, Chapter 13, p. 143
“Let’s take temperature as an example. We tend to imagine a duality to temperature between hot and cold. Hot and cold seem to be opposites. But in reality, hot and cold don’t exist objectively. They are relative terms that depend on our position on a scale, our frame of reference. What is “hot” for one observer may be “cold” for another whose position is further away from zero. Hot and cold are simply words that describe relative degrees of difference on the scale of temperature. They are not fixed or absolute terms that describe objective features of nature, but relative terms that are defined relative to our position on a scale. The unity behind these two is the scale of temperature, one structure to which they both belong, representing opposite poles of the continuum.”
The Whole and The Parts, Chapter 13, p. 143
“A bias is essentially a deviation from “zero,” the neutral viewpoint.”
Bias, Chapter 18, p. 185
“Subjectivity and bias are not the same thing. It is true that the word subjective implies a relative perspective, the viewpoint of one entity and not a universal one. But it is arriving at the universal from the personal that is the basis of all science—even the way we do it now. Science always begins and ends in the personal. This is unavoidable. Our true goal is not really the elimination of the subject, but the reduction or elimination of bias.”
Bias, Chapter 18, p. 186
“If we consider the broader implications of this, metaphysics, in its true form, is a science of energy.”
The Whole and The Parts, Chapter 13, p. 136
“By seeking an understanding of the total order of reality, all natural laws, the way things work materially, but also those laws pertinent to the subjective observer and their experience of the world, it aims to reconstruct, as best it can, a model that includes all the entities in existence and the relationships between them. This is a true and total metaphysical ontology. A system for the total order of reality and all the entities that exist within it.”
