Quote of the Week
(December 29, 2025)

Suppose I were to lose all conceptual grasp of the relations governing the scene outside the window where I am now writing — a scene with a great white pine tree standing just a few meters beyond my desk. I would then have no more reason to connect the particular branch I am now looking at with the trunk of the tree than I would have for connecting it with the contiguous patch of blue sky. The idea that the sky is up there while the tree is here, or that the pressure of the wind against the branches is responsible for their waving, or that the roots in the ground provide mechanical strength in support of the tree’s uprightness, or that the entire tree as an integral unity is growing — these would no longer serve to hold the tree together in my understanding as the unitary kind of thing, or being, it really is.

A wholly unformed content of sense perception is something we presumably never experience as such — because it would not yet be experience. It can assume meaningful, experiential form only so far as it is informed by thought. In routine perception, this informing is already accomplished before we are aware of it. Through long training, our senses are educated by our thinking, so that we do not need to reflect anew, over and over again, upon familiar contents in order to form them into elements of our experience.

(from Chapter 13, “All Science Must Be Rooted in Experience”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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