“Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there.”

Source: Think (1999), Chapter Two, Mind, p. 78

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one…" by Simon Blackburn?
Simon Blackburn photo
Simon Blackburn 29
British academic philosopher 1944

Related quotes

Albert Hofmann photo

“I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane. I was taken to another world, another place, another time. My body seemed to be without sensation, lifeless, strange.”

Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) Swiss chemist

Source: LSD : My Problem Child (1980), Ch. 1 : How LSD Originated
Context: I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane. I was taken to another world, another place, another time. My body seemed to be without sensation, lifeless, strange. Was I dying? Was this the transition? At times I believed myself to be outside my body, and then perceived clearly, as an outside observer, the complete tragedy of my situation. I had not even taken leave of my family (my wife, with our three children had traveled that day to visit her parents, in Lucerne). Would they ever understand that I had not experimented thoughtlessly, irresponsibly, but rather with the utmost caution, and that such a result was in no way foreseeable? My fear and despair intensified, not only because a young family should lose its father, but also because I dreaded leaving my chemical research work, which meant so much to me, unfinished in the midst of fruitful, promising development. Another reflection took shape, an idea full of bitter irony: if I was now forced to leave this world prematurely, it was because of this lysergic acid diethylamide that I myself had brought forth into the world.

Erwin Schrödinger photo

“Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the "world of energy."”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

Nature and the Greeks (1954)
Context: The observing mind is not a physical system, it cannot interact with any physical system. And it might be better to reserve the term "subject" for the observing mind. … For the subject, if anything, is the thing that senses and thinks. Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the "world of energy."

Wallace Stevens photo
Augustus De Morgan photo
Freya Stark photo

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town, is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

Freya Stark (1893–1993) British explorer and writer

Baghdad Sketches

Ernest Hemingway photo
Tommy Lee photo

Related topics