It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.
But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?
It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.
Synaptic summation is the technical term used in neurophysiology for those instances in which some neuron C is fired only by a combination of neurons A and B.
There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.
Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics.
It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.
The wise legislator will only rarely initiate a new rule of behaviour; more usually he will confine himself to affirming in law what has already become the custom of the people.
In the nature of the case, an explorer can never know what he is exploring until it has been explored.
Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.
Life and ‘Mind’ are systemic processes.
It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.
Logic can often be reversed, but the effect does not precede the cause.
Surrender to alcohol intoxication provides a partial and subjective shortcut to a more correct state of mind.
Thirty years ago, we used to ask: Can a computer simulate all processes of logic? The answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked: Can logic simulate all sequences of cause and effect? And the answer would have been no.
It is as if the stuff of which we are made were totally transparent and therefore imperceptible and as if the only appearances of which we can be aware are cracks and planes of fracture in that transparent matrix. Dreams and percepts and stories are perhaps cracks and irregularities in the uniform and timeless matrix. Was this what Plotinus meant by an ‘invisible and unchanging beauty which pervades all things’?
A little hypocrisy and a little compromise oils the wheels of social life.
Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.
The psychedelics are a powerful educational tool. They are the surest way to learn the arbitrariness of our ordinary perception. Many of us have had to use them to find out how little we knew.
When we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain.