Understanding, Book II

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/e/an-essay-concerning-human-understanding/summary-and-analysis/book-ii-of-ideas-chapters-111

 His fundamental thesis is that experience alone is adequate to account for all the ideas included in anyone's store of knowledge.

 Begging the question: how does a mind know how to experience. 

If we assume that ideas are present when one is not awake, there would be no way of distinguishing between having ideas and not having them.

 Equivocation. Dreaming is not being unawake in this sense. 

 The first of these he designates by the term sensation, which refers to the conscious states that are produced by the action of external bodies on the mind. It is in this way that we derive our notions of color, heat, cold, softness, hardness, bitter, sweet, and all the sensible qualities of which one ever becomes aware.

 Asking the right question, avoiding the hard work of getting the right answer. How does the mind know it's supposed to see red things as red? How does the mind know it's supposed to associate shapes with colours?

 For a mind to see blue, it must first have the latent capacity to see blue. It must already enough knowledge of blue to recognize and identify blue as blue. Insofar as his arguments hold up, Locke has proven that Plato is correct, rather than proving he's incorrect.  Anamnesis.

 Knowing Locke is the blank slate guy make this a painfully obvious specimen of sogol. He knows his conclusion, so he confabulates "proofs" that will lead there.

 The second source of our ideas is the perception of the operations which take place within one's mind as it assimilates and interprets the materials that have been received through the senses.

 Begging the question: where does knowledge of these operations come from? 

 For example, we may say of an orange that it is soft, yellow, sweet, and round. Nevertheless, in our minds each of these qualities is separate and distinct.

 Try to imagine a colour without a shape. Try to imagine a shape that has no colour (especially not grey or transparent). Try to imagine something sweet that has no shape. What does chewing on nothing taste like? Try to imagine something soft that has no shape (or colour). 

 Basic tests. 

 It is a curious thing that these very non-distinct properties can be seen separate and abstract apart from the individual things which have the properties. While we can't imagine something shapeless yet yellow, we can imagine any shape of yellow. We can imagine an archetype, a swatch or blob of yellow. We could keep in mind a cube which is the type specimen for blue, against which all other blues are contrasted. There's no known reason this should work, but it not only does work, but works well and easily.

 I find it startlingly contemptible to get so close to these important investigations, then to veer off into politics of all things.

 Secondary qualities include such items as colors, sounds, tastes, and smells. These exist only in the minds of those who perceive them

 Thus invented by the minds out of whole cloth. How do the minds know how to invent them? 

 These errors are largely boring. I think I must skip many of them as variations on a theme: Locke, I find again and again, is especially not-timeless. For example, Plato's forms are hardly the state of the art, but they address a core need, a core function. Whatever you're doing, you will need to employ something that does for you what forms did for Plato.
 Locke is merely repeating the weirdo midwit superstitions of his day, which have nothing to do with anything except fluffing/dissing the egos of other contemporaries.

 In the fourth group, we have such ideas as pleasure, pain, power, existence, unity, and succession.

 What a Democratic herd of ideas. Base. Not based, basic. [Existence] might be the odd one out, but either he included it on an unprincipled exception, or he has no idea how deep the idea is.

 Let's look at Locke doing religious propaganda again:

 This type of activity is illustrated in such ideas as beauty, gratitude, mankind, army, or the universe.
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/e/an-essay-concerning-human-understanding/summary-and-analysis/book-ii-of-ideas-chapters-1233

 Does Locke not understand how profound beauty is? Why is it in this collection of base animal drives? Perhaps he's only thinking of simplistic surface visual appearance. 

 

The problem is a crucial one, for unless we can establish the fact that it is the same person who experiences a series of events, all attempts to derive a satisfactory theory of knowledge will be in vain.

 Nope. As long as the new person has the old person's memories, then they have the old person's knowledge and will make the same predictions. Totally irrelevant consideration.

 

 Plato might be wrong, and might be painfully long-winded, but he stays on topic. Locke's discussion of colour and so on are frankly beside the point. The idea is to make predictions. Either new ones we couldn't make before, or making old predictions more cheaply. The relationship between external colour and internal colour is largely irrelevant to this question. We can't use external colour to make predictions, only the internal, perceived colour. 

 Architects have been making large buildings which stay up for millennia, without understanding the details of the relationship between noumena or phenomena. However it works, we clearly basically works already. Perhaps a deep dive could improve this, but Locke is clearly uninterested in such a thing. He doesn't see how it would be politically useful to him.

  

 There is some slight point to reading this stuff. Something can be salvaged.

  The [internally sensed] weight of an object is also variable, for it appears to be heavier if one lifts it when he is tired.

 Today with better scientific instruments and models, the error here is obvious. However, do you not suspect you are still prone to making the same error? We can characterize this error and try to concoct a test that would let us detect it prospectively. How are we being just as stupid today as Locke's ye olde critics were being?  

 Questions of identity are relevant to values. And that, largely, only because values refer to identity. Say I threaten to cut you. You don't want to be cut, "I don't want to be cut." The predicate has an [I] in it, so it behooves us to work out what counts as [I] and what doesn't. Of course, the problem immediately grants us the solution. You don't like the sensation of being cut. Therefore, [you] is the set of all entities that produce the sensation of cutting when cut. Cue midwit meme; yeah that was easy. Turns out we already know the answer.

 To say that a person, or for that matter any particular object, can change and still remain the same as it was before appears to be a direct violation of the law of non-contradiction.

 It doesn't have to remain identical. Why is Locke assuming it does? It merely has to remain similar enough. 

  Those who believe in an immortal soul 

 How about considering the mortal brain before trying to get weird. Anything which significantly changes the brain kills the host of the brain. Continuity of brain could be wholly sufficient.

 

 Ideas of good and bad are, in Locke's judgment, derived solely from pleasure and pain.

 Seems to me Locke believed in the degenerate journalist!hedonism, not profound Epicurean hedonism. Again, we don't say a father jumping on a grenade to save his son is enjoying himself. "Having fun getting your guts ripped to shreds?" *blurgle* *rattle*

 It is the power of the lawgiver to administer either rewards or punishments, and this is what makes it a matter of pleasure and pain.

 Good ol' Render Unto Caesar, Atheist ver.
 It's a priming rhetorical technique. Pretty sure it kinda doesn't work unless you're already prone to it. Perhaps I should call it a dogwhistle. There are numerous ways to phrase this, but Locke chose the one that is a close as possible to human (hubristic) jurisprudence. The evocation is not accidental.

 

 In his discussion of the truth and falsity of ideas, Locke calls attention to the fact that in the strict sense of these words, ideas are neither true nor false. In this respect, they are like the names that we assign to given objects.

 This looks like deliberate misleading to me. 

 The important part is that, yes, our ideas have their own existence apart of the things which they refer to. Though this is obvious, it bears repeating. If you get an idea of a blue cube by looking at a blue cube, then someone smashes the blue cube and dissolves the dust in acid, then you can still be thinking about a blue cube. They are independent events.
 Locke deliberately distracts from this point. Truth is a different thing, and the lay understanding is wholly functional. It's about a (scalar) match between the idea and the events the idea is supposed to be about.

 They are an effective means of communication, but we cannot say that the name is necessarily like any of the qualities found in the object. The same is true of our ideas.

 Err, yeah, no. The whole point of math is that the idea of 3 and + and 3 is extremely like the event [6]. The relations between the ideas exactly replicate the relations between the events they're supposed to symbolize.

 Indeed one of the interesting mysteries in epistemology is how exactly it is possible to make symbols so alike to the phenomena they symbolize.
 It may be possible because events are made of logic, and brains, likewise, are made of logic. However, this raises another problem: how is it possible, in that case, for symbols to be unlike the things they symbolize. Why or how are we capable of illogic at all? 

 Nevertheless, it is customary to speak of one's ideas as being true or false, and there is a sense in which it is legitimate to do so. 

Obviously that sense is the only coherent sense it could possibly have ever referred to.   

 

 At this point my patience is exhausted. Locke has nothing intelligent to say. If I want to read dumb things I can read them from living men "men" on twitter.