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x This is really what is strangest in the philosopher's calling: this duty of fighting an often solitary fight against learned and dignified persons... with the inescapable implication that he, the solitary fighter, knows better about the really important issues than most of the greatest among the philosophical geniuses.
[JLJ - Writing philosophy has much in common with spray-painting graffiti on a wall - a statement of insight or defiance, perhaps - and then leaving the area. One then wonders who has read the comment, and what their thoughts were, before heading off on their errand, and in fact continuing on in their life. Eventually it is covered by other comments, and perhaps forgotten. Philosophers are to a larger extent prisoners of the age they live in, of what they have read, and of what they are able to synthesize from what they have read. They are also a prisoners of their ability to ask for and take criticism, and of their abilities to take such actions constructively. ]
p.2 that which exists only potentially can never as such determine or influence anything.
[JLJ - I disagree. The potential for a fire can lead us to invest in sprinkler systems, fire extinguishers and fire drills. We may never have a fire, but we would be ready for one, if in fact one happened.]
p.4 To... draw the first lines of an intelligible sketch of a metaphysics of knowledge, let us begin by noting how closed, how restricted, a thing lacking in cognition appears compared with the openness of beings endowed with knowledge.
p.5 [Pascal] All our dignity consists, then, in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves... Let us endeavour, then, to think well...
p.6 what I know is present to me, is within me - including the stars. What I know, I am... that one is what one knows, is a thesis basic to critical realism
[JLJ - In my philosophy, what one is is for the most part irrelevant. You can debate that forever and I choose not to do that. One is when one finds oneself in a predicament, where one must decide at every waking moment how to deal with that predicament, and the predicaments that are to come. One must return again and again to the demands of the predicament, in cycles of activity and in regenerative resting, one cannot wish these demands away or escape from them permanently, so finally one learns how to make wise investments which return in a capability, an adaptive capacity, to meet the demands of the predicament. This philosophy cannot yet deal with what one is when one dies. I suppose that one can treat death as a susension of life, as when one is asleep or under anesthesia, until brought to life again...]
p.8 Knowing is not making, creating, or transforming; we could say that in knowing we touch the object, but we never interfere with it.
[JLJ - Knowing is essentially at core a categorizing. This can be a categorizing for action or even just for further knowing. We categorize all the time because we have to synthesize how to 'go on' from something pre-determined - the world is too complex to 'go on' based on simple appearances only.]
p.12 The object of knowledge, then, which is the known aspect of the thing known, has a dual existence. It exists, first, in nature, in the thing that has it as its own; and it exists, secondly, precisely as an object of cognition in the soul that knows it and, knowing it, possesses it as the other.
p.13 What I know exists in me
[JLJ - Yes, and it animates us and motivates us and directs - perhaps even inspires - our thinking.]
p.29 The possible will be what it is if it is. The kind of thing it is has no influence at all on its actually being brought into existence.
p.38 The purpose of the present work, however, is... to inquire what knowledge is... an inquiry into the essence of knowing can never be completely separated from judgment about its validity
[JLJ - Perhaps knowledge begins with an initial guess, which inspires further refinement, and which leads to a preliminary statement, which has included with it an assessed correctness, and which simply becomes knowledge when grasped at in a predicament, due to the needs of the predicament. I would argue that an inquiry into the essence of knowing can never be completely separated from the predicament we find ourselves in, and which we seek by our nature to maneuver about in. There is a famous Karl Weick story about a group of soldiers who got lost in a snowstorm. One of them produced a map, which they followed, and they were eventually rescued. It turns out that the map they found was for a completely different area. In this case, validity is unimportant, as the team's movement led to their rescue, not the accuracy of what they 'knew'.]
p.42 The starting point of any theory of action must be the fact of change.
[JLJ - In my philosophy, the central concept of being is more high-level, the fact that an entity somehow perceives that it is, and that it has to 'go on,' and must therefore make certain critical actions and otherwise intelligently position itself in its present environment within the current predicament, and must make investments of time and directed activity that have a needed 'pay off' in the short- and long-term future - and so establishes a potential, an adaptive capacity, which one uses as necessary and seemingly endlessly regenerates through management of cycles of sleeping and eating and making a living, in order to 'go on.' This entity must busy itself in cycles of acting and resting, and in a scheming to act. This is followed by executing practical, ethical and socially acceptable tricks that simply work, which one can do over and over again, and which one simply copies from the successful or learns from the school of education or of hard-knocks. Change, you say? Show me - point out to me - something that does not change. Change is a given and must be counted on when determining how to 'go on.' The text of a printed book does not change, but much as a work of art, it can be minutely changed by the author at a later time...]
p.49 is it enough to say simply that immanent activity is an activity whose entire product remains totally within the acting subject?
p.51 Yet the fact is that from its beginning in pure potency to its fulfillment in act, being reveals a line of successive determinations and perfections each of which adds to the preeceding one.
p.51-52 Whether the activity be immanent or transitive, then, the end of the line is always its terminal act.
p.58 In order to know what a thing is, we look at its activity. For minds that do not grasp essences directly and intuitively, that is the only way. But it is also a perfectly safe way... Thus from the characteristics of the action observed, our mind spontaneously infers the characteristics of the acting nature
[JLJ - Looking at the activity of a thing is merely a practical scheme which can usually tell you a lot about the thing, but activity can be misleading, or even can be directed to mislead or to confuse. Also, what if you look at 'it' only when 'it' is resting, or 'it' is sleeping? Looking at the activity of a thing is an intelligent way to learn about it, but unless the behavior 'looked' at is thorough, it is not infallible.]
p.72 We reason only because our knowledge is insufficient
[JLJ - We reason because in order to 'go on' we have to base our actions on something reason-able.]
p.88 Unless there is some opening on that actual physical existence, there is no knowledge. If there is no certitude in experience, all certitude disappears from our knowledge. But if there is no power of knowing that is essentially empirical, there is also no certainty of experience.
[JLJ - Perhaps all knowledge is grounded in both experience and an analysis of effectiveness, which leads us to come to believe in the correctness or usefulness of the knowledge in question.]
p.89 there is little doubt about it; the whole of human experience has its source in sensation... we wonder how many fully appreciate the far-reaching consequences of this familiar truth.
[JLJ - Sensation allows us to connect to reality and to our predicament and to the people and all driving forces within it. Evolution has produced humans with generally the right amount of sensitivity, and a sensitivity tuned precisely to those necessary things needed for survival and productive activity within the predicament of our world.]
p.89-90 If it is true that the senses are basically indefectible with respect to their proper objects, and if every object of sensation, as an object of experiential knowledge, envelops actual physical existence, then it follows that the act of sensing has to be made such as to reach the actual existent without error. Any theory of sensation, therefore, that does not preserve before all else the notion of a knowledge made to reach external reality as it is will be at fault... This is the only sound starting point for a realistic explanation of sensation... We can continue to make progress if we rely on the twofold certitude of the veracity of the senses as well as the experimental, empirical nature of sensation.
[JLJ - Simon ignores here the fact that we can develop a synthetic sensation that works in an imaginary world, such as in a complex game of strategy. Also, a complex world by its nature defeats simple attempts to sense it... we get merely a first-order sensing, or an appearance, which in fact might be different from reality.]
p.90 [footnote] the external senses occupy the final place in the system of our faculties; it is impossible to go any further in tracing the origin of our knowledge or its ultimate resolution.
[JLJ - This is because our senses ground us in the real world and sensitize us to the current predicament we are in, and to the predicaments deemed likely or even reasonably possible to arrive. In my philosophy, we know in order to 'go' on. We can certainly take ourselves outside of our current predicament and wonder about conditions in, say China, but eventually we must return to concerns such as the daily job, the bills to be paid, the neighbors, the car, etc. Knowledge not deemed useful to strategically plan how to 'go on' is much like Jeopardy! knowledge... kind of useless.]
p.108 the idea differs from the thing
p.112 And so, we have to conclude that the influence exercised by the physically existing object is necessary not just to produce the union of its idea with the faculty but also to preserve that union. The sensation will persist only as long as this influence is exercised.
[JLJ - This idea can be applied to atrificial intelligence - our perception must be directed towards diagnostic understanding of the forces and powers at play in our current predicament, and our thought must be directed at uncovering the likely scenarios of action, from which emerges potentials which drive and guide our current and future actions.]
p.113 we can feel at home in the sensible world only to the extent that our sensations are penetrated by thought.
[JLJ - Perhaps the mind - a sensitive nerve fabric programmed by instinct and experience - is impressioned into existence by the sensations of the current predicament. The mind literally imagines itself into existence in an unexplainable act of wonder - a primal reveling in the present - intelligently perceiving the current predicament, then goes about thinking and scheming, followed by a re-positioning of itself within it. Perhaps our minds are pre-programmed to sense and to make sense of the things in our world, following by scheming how to 'go on' in it, and which control or modulate our base instincts in order to 'go on' within our current predicament.]
p.114 It is seeing ideas incarnate in the sensible things of nature that gives them, as it were, a human countenance.
[JLJ - Our human nature is responsible for surfacing ideas of profound depth and insight when confronted by the perceptions of normal daily living. This makes 'going on' easy to conceive, near effortless, and thwarted only by the similarly deep and insightful plans of our neighbors and fellow citizens...]
p.115 How strange the world when it is merely sensed! ...the universe of pure sensation is an inhuman universe that becomes human only to the extent that sensation is penetrated by thought. The customary universe of human perception owes its appearance, its consistency, and its humanity to the presence of thought in human perception.
[JLJ - Hence, 'artificial' intelligence would seem to become less and less artificial, the more the physical machine processing comes to resemble human thought. Perhaps thought itself begins with a wondering, a 'what is that?' and an immediate 'how much should I care about that?', followed by an ordering of the things that one has wondered about. Thought also concerns a prediction of events to be, and a revisitation of that which once was, but is no more. We improvise a plan to go on, always wondering, as a basis of our thought.]
p.117 no matter how much one tries to purify the sensible datum when passing from the sensation to the image, or how ingeniously one manipulates the image, one cannot and will never come up with an idea. The idea clearly does not come from the senses; it comes and can only come from the mind.
[JLJ - Can we not 'artificially' produce ideas using heuristics and clever categorizations which identify and select among tricks that work, for estimations and evaluations - of all kinds?]
p.118 [Dalbiez] How is one to explain dreaming?
[JLJ - It is quite simply actually - the mind manufactures reality. From our senses when awake, but from its own internal activity when dreaming.]
p.120 A mind without innate ideas has no recourse other than to produce it [sic] own ideas, for nothing from sensible reality or the sense can produce them in it. But since the mind does not have within itself any ideas to direct its activity, and since their production requires preformation, which it cannot provide for itself, the mind has to be supplied with that preformation in some fashion, virtual or potential, by a knowledge not its own.
[JLJ - In my view, ideas come from a scheme that works, in order to go on, and which must by its nature produce ideas. An effective scheme simply produces ideas on how to proceed, from experience or instinct, weighs them, then selects one and acts on it. The mind produces, in my view, not ideas in isolation, but schemes to go on, which at some point require direction when none is obvious. The mind simply latches onto a cue here, a just-wondered-about or noticed curious relationship, a former experience now remembered, a premonition of the moment and perhaps an instinct, combining them all to produce a symbol, interpreted either as an idea or as a direction, at seemingly directionless intervals.]
p.123 At the outset, the activity of the mind has no specification... but confronted with an image, the active faculty takes possession of that image as a specifying instrument with whose help the action is completed in the mind by the production of the idea.
In our opinion, this is the most plausible explanation of the birth of the idea, although we admit that it does not dispose of all the mysteries.
[JLJ - Much as how in my opinion a machine can be 'programmed' to play a complex game of strategy. We tell it how to construct rough ideas for how to proceed, and how to test those ideas in a realistic simulator of sorts. We tell it how to construct scenarios and when to pay attention and when to lose interest. And then we seek to improve it through competition. Ideas are mysteries only when we do not see how they form - when we can observe the process, as in the 'thinking' of an artificially intelligent agent, there is hardly any mystery, is there?]
p.132 The thing thought is, in a certain sense, the work of thought. The intellect lives in a spiritual world that is its own creation, because it cannot live anywhere else. The intellect can deal only with what is like itself, and the actuality of what is known... can only be the act of a spiritual subject.
p.136 To recognize the conformity of knowledge and the real is to know the truth.
[JLJ - I would assert that whatever 'conformity' is 'recognized' is in the end merely a truth claim.]
p.145 because one cannot compare the known with the unknown, and since the object of the non-exhaustive perception is presented to the mind surrounded by an area of the unknown, somehow the object must be made to reveal more than what it is showing.
[JLJ - Our senses continuously present to us parts of things and unresolved tensions, and the appearance of conflicts and peaceful interactions. Wisdom suggests that we ought - due to the nature of our current predicament - to jump to reasoned conclusions as to what makes up the remainder or the 'unsensed' parts or fragments, what is likely on the other side of what we are 'seeing,' and therefore what is truly confronting us. Perception is kind of useless unless we can wisely interpret what we sense, and practically use such interpretations, perhaps in wisely constructed schemes of action, in order to 'go on.']
p.158 We get ideas, we express concepts, we make constructs, we discourse - all for the sake of knowing the truth. When this is understood, one is secured against most misconceptions about the activity of the mind.
[JLJ - Yawn. I would say all the above, but for the sake of 'going on' within our predicament. No wonder no one reads your philosophy, Yves.]
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