Quotes About Understanding

is not easy to ascertain what an algorithm actually is, simply by examining its output.

The identification of any object in the first-person case is ruled out by the enterprise of scientific explanation. So science cannot tell me who I am, let alone where, when, or how.

Judgement requires, then, the joint operation of sensibility and understanding. A mind without concepts would have no capacity to think; equally, a mind armed with concepts, but with no sensory data to which they could be applied, would have nothing to think about.

Like the pleasure of friendship, the pleasure in beauty is curious: it aims to understand its object, and to value what it finds.

There are plenty of artists who are awoken by criticism to the meaning of their own works: such, for example, was T. S. Eliot's response to Helen Gardner's book about his poetry—namely, at last I know what it means.

how can I know the world as it is? I can have knowledge of the world as it seems, since that is merely knowledge of my present perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings. But can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of how it seems? To put the question in slightly more general form: can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of my own point of view?

Now it seems to me that the right way to love a dog is to love him not as a person, but as a creature that has been raised to the edge of personhood, so as to look into a place that is opaque to him but from which emerge signals that he understands in another way than we who send them.

If we base our love for our dog on the premise that he, like us, is a person, then we damage both him and ourselves. We damage him by making demands that no animal can fully understand – holding him to account in ways that make no sense to him. We will feel bound to keep him alive, as we keep each other alive, for the sake of a relation that, being personal, is also eternal.

Philosophy is the art of second glances

The idea that scientific method is the only method of discovering the truth has a lot to be said for it, if you mean by truth how the world ultimately is as a system of organised matter, but I defend cognitive dualism: that world can be understood completely in another way which also has its truths which are not translatable into the truths of science. So we have to look at the different ways we organise this material that science explains for us.

Kant wishes to draw the limits of the understanding. If there are things that cannot be grasped by the understanding, then all assertions about them are meaningless.

But that is not the approach of the evolutionary psychologists, who argue that we can best understand our states of mind if we identify their evolutionary origins, and the contribution that they (or some earlier version of them) might have made to the reproductive strategies of our genes.

The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown....To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three.

If someone asks you why you're oppressing a world and you reply with a lot of poetic crap, no. I guess there can't be a meeting of minds.

So I simply said one of the great trite truths: There is generally more than one side to a story.

But that is the way it is with all oracles, Jack. When that which is foreseen comes to pass, the inquirer is no longer the same person he was when he posed the question. It is impossible to make a man understand what he will become with the passage of time; and it is only a future self to whom a prophecy is truly relevant.

Does anybody really care about a hungry cat, except for a few friends?

Only a fool believes that life has but one meaning.

If they come upon one who still has not seen it and they speak to him of fire, he does not know what they mean. So they, in turn, fall back upon telling him what fire is like. As they do so, they know from their own experience that what they are telling him is not the truth, but only a part of it. They know that this man will never know reality from their words, though all the words in the world are theirs to use.

The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown.

Two versions of the same face looking into blank screens, two very different minds thinking of things unsaid. Sometimes love is in silence.

To speak is to name names, but to speak is not important. A thing happens once that has never happened before. Seeing it, a man looks upon reality. He cannot tell others what he has seen. Others wish to know, however, so they question him saying, 'What is it like, this thing you have seen?' So he tries to tell them.

I can see through Shadow, Corwin.

You are the only ones who can appreciate my triumph.