Quote of the Week
(December 22, 2025)

Some truths are so obvious and foundational that we easily forget them in our quest for new knowledge. The fact that anything we can understand must share in the nature of thinking — must in one way or another be meaningful — may be one such truth. If a thing cannot present itself to us as thought, it may as well not exist as far as we are concerned.

But our conceptualizing or thinking capacity is only one of the contributors to our experience, and therefore to an empirical science. Our senses also contribute. And here, too, we can say that, without the qualities of sense, we have no material world to talk about. If you open yourself to any phenomenon whatever and then (in imagination) remove all sensible qualities from it — all the given colors, sounds, touch sensations, smells, and so on — nothing will be left. You are confronting an absolute void.

Not even the most rigorous mathematics can give us a world, since nothing in mathematical thought itself tells us what the mathematics is about. We must apply the mathematics to sensible experience if we want to see how mathematical ideas are expressed in material reality. But the same applies to all thinking, not just to the purely quantitative ideas of mathematics: only by bringing our thought into relation with what comes through our senses do we find the world taking shape around us.

(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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