The wine itself has aesthetic value; but what it is for a wine to have aesthetic value cannot be understood without making reference to the experience to tasting it
Tim CraneI have a general moral: great philosophers may be great, but that is not a reason to follow them. Don't be a follower. Work it out for yourself.
Tim CraneAlthough a lot of my work on the mind has been rather abstract and philosophical, I'm interested in psychology and neuroscience and I don't think there are any principled distinctions between the kind of knowledge we get from science and the knowledge we get from philosophy.
Tim CraneScience will always raise philosophical questions like, is any scientific theory or model correct? How do we know? Are unobserved things real? etc. and it seems to me of great importance that these questions are not just left to scientists, but that there are thinkers who make it their business to think as clearly and slowly about these questions as it is possible to. Great scientists do not always make the best philosophers.
Tim CraneWould it be better if religions were to disappear? I have no idea. Since I do not have any confidence in the association of truth with virtue, I am not sure if the world would be a better place if people believed more true things. But what is undeniable is that we cannot understand our own culture unless we recognise that it was formed, for good or bad, as a Christian culture. It's an illusion that we could somehow recover a human essence which is independent of the way it was created by culture.
Tim CraneWe have no proper understanding of the relationship between conscious thought and conscious sensation. The various forms of thought and sensation are underpinned by very different neural mechanisms; so how can the neural correlate of their conscious natures be the same? I don't think we are yet in a position to make such speculations. To make progress, we have to have a good conception of the phenomenology of consciousness, among other things.
Tim Crane