Quotes About Consciousness

Physical science has progressed by leaving the mind out of what it tries to explain, but there may be more to the world than can be understood by physical science.

Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science. The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything. If we take this problem seriously, and follow out its implications

The subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality, and it must occupy as fundamental a place in any credible world view as matter, energy, space, time and numbers.

The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.

Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately therefore such beings should be comprehensible to themselves.

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness.

Persons and other conscious beings are part of the natural order, and their mental states are part of the way the world is in itself.

These essays are about life: about its end, its meaning, its value, and about the metaphysics of consciousness. Some of the topics have not received much attention from analytic philosophers, because it is hard to be clear and precise about them, and hard to separate from a mixture of facts and feelings those questions abstract enough for philosophical treatment.

Si yo fuera solipsista, probablemente no habría escrito este libro, pues no creería que hubiese alguien más que lo leyera.

Public money ought to be touched with the most scrupulous consciousness of honour. It is not the produce of riches only, but of the hard earnings of labour and poverty. It is drawn even from the bitterness of want and misery. Not a beggar passes, or perishes in the streets, whose mite is not in that mass.

One may dream the same dream at intervals for years, and in each case it is an unconscious action, but if in his dream he recalls that he has had this dream before, and recognizes what is coming next, or remembers that it is different from what it was before, there has entered into his dream a factor of conscious thinking.

Very often it happens that one starts in to study some problem, and after gathering a mass of facts pertaining to it, the attempt is made to set them in order, and the conscious effort ends in confusion and disorder. Then the conscious effort is abandoned, and the unconscious which has been at work all the time has a chance to project up into consciousness a perfect plan or outline of the subject.

We have to confess that one man manifests more of the divine life than another, because he furnishes, consciously or otherwise, a better channel through which the divine life may flow. He has more avenues of expression, and is able to keep them open, and hence is a better medium through which the divine life may speak.

The mind uses considerable creativity in constructing a reality for us that makes sense.

the notion of what existentialists call 'ekstatic' temporality adds a qualitative and personal dimension to the phenomenon of time-consciousness. For the existentialist, the value and meaning of each temporal dimension of lived time is a function of our attitudes and choices.

All the arguments urged by Berkeley and Hume against the existence of a material world, are grounded on this principle, That we do not perceive external objects themselves, but certain images or ideas in our own minds

Rhetoric accomplishes its work by inducing us to shift, at least potentially, how we dwell or see ourselves dwelling in the world.

You never know yourself till you know more than your body.

My mind s a center of divine operations

in the true order everything is seen from within.

Whatever we believe does, for us, in very fact exist. Our beliefs may be erroneous from the point of view of a happier belief, but this does not alter the fact that for ourselves our beliefs are our realities, and these realities must continue until some ground is found for a change in belief.

It is this bloody-mindedness - the obsessive quest for wisdom though it brings no peace, the desire to gain knowledge of a future that cannot be circumvented, the relentless preparation for a doom that cannot be avoided - that reminds us of our own self-defeating consciousness, the knowledge of mortality that defines our humanity.

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.