“If you think that you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking of the thing which it is attached to, then you have a legal mind.”

--- widely attributed to Thomas Reed Powell, early 20th Century legal thinker; via Pierre Schlag's blog post "Law School Exam Last Minute Help" December 6, 2011

"Listen to the questions posed by philosophers but don’t be distracted by their answers"

--- Christof Koch, from Chapter 20, "An Interview" (fictitious) in The quest for consciousness: a neurobiological approach, Roberts & Company, 2004,  p. 316-17 (hardback)

Interviewer: What, then, is the role of philosophers in your quest for a scientific theory of consciousness?

Christof: Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about the natural world in a decisive manner, whether it’s the origin and evolution of the cosmos, the origin of life, the nature of the mind, or the nature-versus-nurture debate. This failure is rarely talked about in polite, academic company. Philosophers, however, excel as asking conceptual questions from a point of view that scientists don’t usually consider. Notions of the Hard versus the Easy Problem of consciousness, phenomenal versus access consciousness, the content of consciousness versus consciousness as such, the unity of consciousness, the causal conditions for consciousness to occur, and so on, are fascinating issues that scientists should ponder more often. So, listen to the questions posed by philosophers but don’t be distracted by their answers. A case in point is the philosopher’s zombie.

"life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going"

--- from The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams, quoted by Christof Koch as the epigraph to Ch. 11, Memories and Consciousness (p. 187) of The quest for consciousness: a neurobiological approach, Roberts & Company (2004) (hardback)

Epigraph as given:

Has it ever struck you, Connie, that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going? It’s really all memory, Connie, except for each passing moment.

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are"

--- The Talmud (also attributed to Anais Nin), quoted by Allen Frances in his review (pay wall) of Richard Noll's American Madness: The rise and fall of dementia praecox in New Scientist, 10 December 2011

Quote in context:

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." This simple Talmudic saying summarises the essence of epistemology. Psychiatric disorders provide a striking example: they are not real things in nature, but labels we create to describe troubling aspects of human experience.

Sometimes labels take on a life of their own. People mistakenly think that naming a psychiatric problem shapes it into a simple disease with a reductionist, biological explanation. Labelling mental disorders is useful in providing a common language and guide to treatment. But psychiatric disorders are remarkably heterogeneous and overlapping in their presentations and complex in their causation. The human brain rarely reveals its secrets in simple answers.

All of which brings us to the wonderful book, American Madness, an artful analysis of the rise and fall of the label "dementia praecox" from its promising birth in 1896 to its unlamented death in 1927. Introduced by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, the term was used to describe an early onset of psychotic symptoms that presaged a tragic downhill course and poor outcome - as distinct from manic depressive illness, which has a more variable age of onset, cyclical course, and greater chance for a good outcome. 

Later in the piece, Frances notes:

In retrospect, there was nothing inherently superior about either term. Schizophrenia won [over dementia praecox because it was less discouraging, implied therapy might help, was not of German origin when the US was at war with Germany and was of Swiss origin at a time when the two major figures in American psychiatry were Swiss immigrants. If it sounds arbitrary, it was. Human nature doesn't sort into neat and obvious categories.

"a broken heart mends much faster from a conclusive blow than it does from slow strangulation"

--- Diana Athill, in Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir (2009), p. 20

In context:

My second after-Paul love was available, even eligible, but his very eligibility seemed to make him too good to be true. He liked me a lot. For a time he almost thought he was in love with me, but he never quite was and I sensed almost from the beginning that it was going to end in tears, whereupon I plunged in deeper and deeper. And it did end in tears quite literally, both of us weeping as we walked up and down Wigmore Street on our last evening together. With masochistic abandon lloved him even more for his courage in admitting the situation and sparing me vain hopes (and in fact such courage, which takes a lot of summoning up, is some thing to be grateful for, because a broken heart mends much faster from a conclusive blow than it does from slow strangulation. Believe me! Mine experienced both.)

Another  nice passage is on p. 49:

I think that underneath, or alongside, a reader's conscious response to a text, whatever is need in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need.

"Each algorithm has a point of view"

--- Kevin Slavin, interviewed by Alison George for New Scientist in "Game developer: Beware algorithms running your life" 22 August 2011

Quote in context:

The pernicious thing about algorithms is that they have the mathematical quality of truth - you have the sense that they are neutral - and yet, of course, they have authorship. For example, Google's search engine is composed entirely of fancy mathematics, but its algorithms, like everybody's, are all based on an ideology - in this case that a page is more valuable if other pages think it's valuable. Each algorithm has a point of view, and yet we have no sense of what algorithms are, or even that they exist.

"Though you may get a new life, you can’t get a new past. You don’t get to leave your story."

--- Poet Wendell Berry, in the essay “Sweetness Preserved” (1998) about the poetry of Donald Hall, discussing “Elegy for Wesley Wells”, collected in Imagination in Place: Essays (2011)

Quote in context:

In immortalizing his grandfather Wells, Donald Hall the young elegist is also immortalizing a part of his own life which he now considers to be finished. That life, if it is to have a present life, must have the immortal life of art. Maybe you are outside your life when you think your past has ended. Maybe you are outside your life when you think you are outside it. I don’t know what Donald Hall in later life would say. I know only what I in later life would say, partly from knowing the story I am talking about, that though you may get a new life, you can’t get a new past. You don’t get to leave your story. If you leave your story, then how you left your story is your story, and you had better not forget it.