Quote of the Week
(March 16, 2026)

Listen to neuroscientist and philosopher, Paul Churchland, assuring us that our various forms of observation — sight, hearing, touch, and so on — are not to be trusted: “The red surface of an apple does not look like a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths, but that is what it is”.

Our senses, in other words, are said to fail us because they do not show us the red surface of the apple as really consisting of unimaginably small “billiard balls” or “wave packets” reflecting other balls or packets. And so, again, apart from such sense-based imagery — the very thing that physics today forbids us from projecting into atomic theory — Churchland’s argument would be wholly unpersuasive.

The point is decisive. Only by picturing particles (or waves) as little bits of the qualitatively experienced world can the reader fill in Churchland’s description in a way that makes it sound meaningful. But this sensible perception of the world’s qualities is exactly what Churchland is trying to dismiss. While telling us that the familiar qualities of the world are illusions, he invites us to project these same qualities into the sub-microscopic realm. That realm then becomes proof that the familiar qualities aren’t to be taken seriously. Apparently sensory qualities, such as the firmness and solidity of material things, are illusions here (where we can experience them), but real there (where we cannot).

(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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