Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.
Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the belief that the universe operates according to logical and mathematical principles, suggesting a divine rationality behind existence.
Eric Kandel's quote highlights a significant shift in human thought that began during the Enlightenment, where the universe was perceived as governed by rational laws, often attributed to a mathematical creator. This notion suggests that science's role is to uncover the intricate mathematical principles behind the creation and functioning of the universe, framing humanity's quest for knowledge as both an intellectual and spiritual pursuit.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on the philosophy of science, one might quote this to discuss the historical perspective on rationality in the universe.
More from Eric Kandel
All quotes →Psychoanalysis has a degree of unreliability about it. You will never know whether you've found the truth. You may find a subjective truth, but you don't know.
You learn emotional experiences as much as you learn cognitive experiences, except that they are more unconscious. Sometimes one represses the cognitive component of it, but it's often more difficult to repress the emotional component.
A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.
I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.
In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.
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Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?
Am I alive and a reality, or am I but a dream?
Both force and money are impotent against ideas.
The objections to religion are of two sorts - intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.
I feel like the Internet needs to be disarmed in some way. There needs to be a philosophical undermining of the Internet. We take it too seriously and too literally. For a reference we go to Wikipedia, which is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. It's kind of beautiful - it's all the product of imagination; it's not reality at all.
What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.