Quotes About Consciousness

It is as great a crime to leave a woman alone in her agony and deny her relief from her suffering as it is to insist upon dulling the consciousness of a natural mother who desires above all things to be aware of the final reward of her efforts, whose ambition is to be present, in full possession of her senses, when the infant she already adores greets her with its first loud cry and the soft touch of its restless body upon her limbs.

To talk without thinking is to shoot without aiming.

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its "surroundings" in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. "Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition.

There was still hope. I still had a chance to resurrect myself. I'd just have to do it consciously, every step of the way.

Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition.

Do you mean, that will be enough to satisfy you – or do you intend making a conscious decision to be satisfied?" She

If the technology improves sufficiently, the environmental impact of the wealthiest Copy could end up being less than that of the most ascetic living human. Who'll have the high moral ground, then? We'll be the most ecologically sound people on the planet.

Who exactly am I saving from shame, when I'll live and die in every possible way?

The whole idea of a creator tears itself apart. A universe with conscious beings either finds itself in the dust … or it doesn't. It either makes sense of itself on its own terms, as a self-contained whole … or not at all. There never can, and never will be, Gods.

How do you know which parts of the world are you, in the polises?' 'Are there citizens in Konishi who eat music?' 'Is not having a body like falling all the time, without moving?

Had David Hawthorne, by another name, achieved the immortality he'd paid for? Or had he died somewhere along the way? There was no answer. The most that could be said, at any moment, was that someone existed who knew – or believed – that they'd once been David Hawthorne. And so Peer had made the conscious decision to let that be enough.

Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition.

I look up at her. "Let's not make a big deal of this. It's time for me to become a machine.

A universe with conscious beings either finds itself in the dust...or it doesn't. It either makes sense of itself on its own terms, as a self-contained whole...or not at all. There never can, and never will be, Gods .

All we can ever know about are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls.

How does it feel to be seven thousand years old?" "That depends." "On what?" "On how I want to feel.

What am I? The data? The process that generates it? The relationships between the numbers?

Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?

Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.

One did not need to believe in the Force to know right from wrong.

The shadow of the Newtonian worldview is promulgated by those who wish, for whatever reason, to reinforce the view of a deterministic Universe with consciousness as a bizarre epiphenomenon.

Similar to observers in the Copenhagen interpretation, we only see the possibility we focus on. And that's the key to locking that particular possibility into place as "reality.

If all of the dos and don'ts of quantum possibilities are true and emotion is the key to choosing reality, then the question is: "How do we feel as if something has happened when the person next to us stares us squarely in the face and says that it hasn't?