All Quotes By Tag: Cognition
“There is a sense in which all cognition can be said to be motivated. One is motivated to understand the world, to be in touch with reality, to remove doubt, etc. Alternately one might say that motivation is an aspect of cognition itself. Nevertheless, motives like wanting to find the truth, not wanting to be mistaken, etc., tend to align with epistemic goals in a way that many other commitments do not. As we have begun to see, all reasoning may be inextricable from emotion. But if a person’s primary motivation in holding a belief is to hue to a positive state of mind, to mitigate feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, or guilt for instance. This is precisely what we mean by phrases like “wishful thinking”, and “self-deception”. Such a person will of necessity be less responsive to valid chains of evidence and argument that run counter to the beliefs he is seeking to maintain. To point out non-epistemic motives in an others view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt on a persons connection to the world as it is.”
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“Anger’s like a battery that leaks acid right out of meAnd it starts from the heart ’til it reaches my outer me”
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“I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.”
“There are many ways of being clever, but only one way of being wise.”
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“It has been said that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. But when a language dies, it is a whole world that comes to an end.”
“I wanted that future officer to weigh decisions with a supple mind and to be comfortable with nuance and uncertainty. ”
“Question the answers, I repeated every class. Reevaluate your conclusions when the evidence changes.”
“God judges men from the inside out; men judge men from the outside in. Perhaps to God, an extreme mental patient is doing quite well in going a month without murder, for he fought his chemical imbalance and succeeded; oppositely, perhaps the healthy, able and stable man who has never murdered in his life yet went a lifetime consciously, willingly never loving anyone but himself may then be subject to harsher judgment than the extreme mental patient. It might be so that God will stand for the weak and question the strong.”
“Whenever I think of something but can’t think of what it was I was thinking of, I can’t stop thinking until I think I’m thinking of it again. I think I think too much.”