Intriguing Words, Expressions, Phrases

• Over-simplification - We must at all costs avoid over-simplification, which one might be tempted to call the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation. (see How to Do Things with Words)
• Reverberant doubt - an amazing and disturbing slide from certain restraint to certain pushing? It is a cascade, a stampede, in which the tiniest flicker of a doubt has become amplified into the gravest avalanche of doubt. And the brighter you are, the more quickly and clearly you see what there is to fear. A bunch of amiable slowpokes might well be more likely to unanimously refrain and get the big payoff than a bunch of razor-sharp logicians who all think perversely recursively reverberantly. It's that smartness to see that initial flicker of a doubt that triggers the whole avalanche and sends rationality a-tumblin' into the abyss. (see Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern)
• He had an extreme consciousness of the social rules and conventions placed upon him. Puzzled since childhood by the 'obvious duties', he was doubly detached from the imitation game of social life, as pure scientist and homosexual. Manners, committees, examinations, interrogations, German codes and fixed moral codes - they all threatened his freedom. Some he would accept, some actually enjoy obeying, others reject, but in any case he was peculiarly conscious, self-conscious of things that other people accepted 'without thinking'. (see Alan Turing: The Enigma)
• I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and that what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind - especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called "consciousness" and the other the "unconscious". (see Steps to an Ecology of Mind)
• The essence and raison d'être of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information, and/or the reduction of the random by "restraint". (see Steps to an Ecology of Mind)
• The better an organism knows something, the less conscious it becomes of its knowledge.