Monday, 18 April 2022

To know how we know

 "All men by nature desire to know"

... but very few desire to know HOW they know.

Original: πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.
- Aristotle (384–322 BC), at the beginning of his book "Metaphysics", a treatise of "first philosophy".
 
That is why, since Aristotle, the human mind has not evolved: we just use it. That is not enough for promoting peace, #MindfulPeace.

Aristotle thought that the mind forms ideas by TAKING the "forms" of things and separating them from the "matter" of things. This way of producing ideas was for him the basic process  that enables us to understand the nature of things.
Unfortunately he made a small mistake here:
we do not "separate" forms from things: instead, we "produce" forms (mental constructs) that we ADD to the "matter" of things, like a potter modeling clay, thus producing the "experiential" things of our experiential world.

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