Synopsis:
- No substance ("neutral monism"): everything in the universe is made of space-time events, and events are neither mental nor physical (both matter and mind are meaningless over-simplifications of reality)
- Matter is less material than Newton thought, and the spirit is less spiritual than Berkley thought
- They are different ways of organizing space-time
- What truly exists is "events"
- The difference between matter and mind is simply the "causal" relationships that are brought to bear
- Sensations are both material and mental
- A sensation is part of the object that can be constructed out of it
- A sensation is also part of the mind in whose biography the perception occurred
- An object is defined by all the appearances that emanate from the place where it is towards minds
- A mind is defined by all the appearances that start from objects and reach it
- Consciousness allows us to perceive some of the processes that occur in our brain
- What a neurophysiologist really sees while examining someone else's brain is a part of her own brain
- The irreducibility of the mental to the physical is an illusion: the mental and the physical are different ways of knowing the same thing, the former by consciousness and the latter by the senses
- Consciousness gives us immediate, direct knowledge of what is in the brain, whereas the senses can observe what is in the brain
- The mental is a transparent grasp of the intrinsic character of the brain.
- Consciousness is just another sense
- The proposition (a logical artifact) vs the sentence (its description in natural language)
- A name "signifies" a concept, a concept "denotes" an object
- Calculus of classes (a class is the set of objects by which a function is satisfied)
- Logical reconstruction of Mathematics
- The second theorem of the 110th chapter of the second volume proves that 1+1=2
- Paradox in Frege's system of Logic:
- The class of all the classes that are not members of themselves is both a member and not a member of itself (the barber who shaves all barbers who do not shave themselves)
- A predicate cannot be predicated of itself
- Theory of types (logical contradictions can be resolved at a higher level)
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