McGinn doesn’t exactly mean that human beings are just too stupid; nor is he offering the popular but mistaken argument that the human brain cannot understand itself because containers cannot contain themselves (so that we can never absorb enough data to grasp our own workings). No: instead he introduces the idea of cognitive closure. This means that the operations the human mind can carry out are incapable in principle of taking us to a proper appreciation of what consciousness is and how it works. It’s as if, on a chess board, you were limited to diagonal moves: you could go all over the board but never link the black and white squares. That wouldn’t mean that one colour was magic, or immaterial. Equally, from God’s point of view, there’s probably no mystery about consciousness at all - it may well be a pretty simple affair when you understand it - but we can no more take the God’s-eye point of view than a dog could adopt a human understanding of physics.
Then I started going solitary, feeding my addiction. My obsession with Ms. Pacman eventually shifted to Galaga, a game of shooting not gulping. Even now, nearly twenty years later, I can still see and hear the icons as they dove from the top of the screen, and I can feel my shooting fingers start to twitch, the adrenaline rushing. I would park my battered Chevy near Wilshire Boulevard and take the ten-minute walk to the UCLA library through Westwood Village, but invariably I would be drawn to the amusement arcade for a “quick game.” Two hours later I would blink into the L.A. sunlight, bleary, frazzled, twenty bucks poorer —- but onto stage thirteen at last! Much later I moved on to Defender, a game so demanding, so all-consuming, that I began to understand all those stories about teenagers hopelessly lost to video games. I became an arcade addict, a machine machine. But I will fight the temptation to dilate further upon this ludic phase of my life, lest the reader suspect I am still not over it. (I haven’t played a game in years, honestly.)
from Chapter Four, “Mind and Reality”: The general point here is that it is wrong to confuse reality itself with our ways of knowing about it. Reality is one thing; our knowledge of it is another. The past is not the same as our memories of it; physical objects are not the same as the sensory states we have when we perceive them; other people’s minds are not the same as the behavior we use to infer things about them; the future is not the same as the current indications of how it will turn out; elementary particles are not the same as the meter readings that signal their presence; and so on. To be sure, there are exceptions to this general rule; as already mentioned, fictional entities have no reality beyond the intentions of authors —- they are invented, not discovered. That is why we call them fictions, and distinguish fiction from nonfiction in bookshops and libraries. Real detectives are not the same as fictional detectives —- of course they’re not.
Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ‘bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.
New Mysterianism is a philosophy proposing that certain problems will never be explained or at the least cannot be explained by the human mind at its current evolutionary stage. The problem most often referred to is the hard problem of consciousness; i.e. how to explain sentience and qualia and their interaction with consciousness.
New Mysterianism is often characterized as a presupposition that some problems cannot be solved. Critics of this view argue that it is arrogant to assume that a problem cannot be solved just because we have not solved it yet. On the other hand, New Mysterians would say that it is just as absurd to assume that every problem can be solved. Crucially, New Mysterians would argue that they did not start with any supposition as to the solvability of the question, and instead reached their conclusion through logical reasoning.
It horrifies Australians to know that pregnant humpback whales breeding in the warm waters off Australia this winter will be targeted by the Japanese hunters in Antarctic waters this Christmas.
Petey’s principle also applies to the left, which perpetually wants to raise taxes for the problems caused by high taxes, or increase the size of the welfare state to cope with the pathologies caused by the welfare state, or appease our enemies to deal with the problems caused by appeasement, or improve the environment by undermining the economic progress that makes the improvement possible, or increase education spending to pay for the problems caused by our dysfunctional educational establishment, or make health care insanely expensive by making it “free,” or promote scientism to attack the religious traditions that made genuine science possible, or solve the problems of the black family by making fathers unnecessary, or halt AIDS by encouraging the behavior that causes it, or end racial discrimination by making it against to law to not discriminate on the basis of race. All of these things involve transfers of wealth and services from the mature to the immature, thus ensuring that the latter continue to flourish. So who’s stupid? If nothing else, mind parasites know how to survive.
Its unique combination of facilities includes a ski slope and artillery range, in addition to the academic buildings and sports facilities found on a typical university campus.
