“It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference — inference either intuitive or deliberate.”

— Arthur Stanley Eddington

Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 13 Reality

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 "It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental char…" by Arthur Stanley Eddington?

Arthur Stanley Eddington 105

British astrophysicist 1882–1944

Related quotes

“Mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience; all else is remote inference.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929), III, p.37

“No scientist has yet provided an acceptable definition of "mind" or "mental" that reveals the character of "unconscious mental processes," and no physicist a lucid definition of "elementary particles" that shows how they can appear or disappear, and why there are so many.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1960 (1961)

“All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness […] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find […] a being which immediately recognises itself, […] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

Source: Phenomenology of Perception

“It’s a game of a million inferences. There are a lot of things to draw inferences from — cards played and not played.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

On the game of bridge, as quoted in Forbes (2 June 1997); also quoted in The Warren Buffett Portfolio: Mastering the Power of the Focus Investment Strategy (2000), p. 112
Context: It’s a game of a million inferences. There are a lot of things to draw inferences from — cards played and not played. These inferences tell you something about the probabilities. It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time.

“The substratum of mental activity must be sought only in ponderable matter.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

“Sometimes the character of the mistress is inferred from the dress of her maids.”
Interdum animus dominarum ex ancillarum habitu iudicatur.

Jerome (345–420) Catholic saint and Doctor of the Church

Letter 54
Letters

“Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable.”

Gilbert Ryle book The Concept of Mind

Source: The Concept of Mind (1949), Ch. II: Knowing How and Knowing That, (10) Solipsism

“But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data.”

Charles Sheffield book Transcendence

Source: The Heritage Universe, Transcendence (1992), Chapter 11 (p. 126)

“In view of the dramatic effects that alternative representations may produce on search and recognition processes, it may seem surprising that the differential effects on inference appear less strong. Inference is largely independent of representation if the information content of the two sets of inference rules [one operating on diagrams and the other operating on verbal statements] is equivalent—i. e. the two sets are isomorphs as they are in our examples”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: 1980s and later, "Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words," (1987), p. 71, as cited in: Bauer, Malcolm I., and Philip N. Johnson-Laird. " How diagrams can improve reasoning http://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/papers/1993diags%26reasoning.pdf." Psychological Science 4.6 (1993): 372-378.

“There is a connected set of events (light-waves) travelling outward from a centre… there are some respects in which all events are alike, and others in which they differ… We must not think of a light-wave as a 'thing', but as a connected group of rhythmical events. The mathematical characteristics of such a group can be inferred by physics, but the intrinsic character of the component events cannot be inferred.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics (1927)
1920s

“It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference — inference either intuitive or deliberate.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Arthur Stanley Eddington 105

Related quotes

Related topics