Quotes About Consciousness

I am aware that I am aware

Start admiring the vastness of the forest and a tree will surely fall on you, bashing your skull for the crime of perspective.

I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. I was born an insomniac and that's the way I'll die, wasting thousands of hours along the way longing for unconsciousness,

I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. I was born an insomniac and that's the way I'll die, wasting thousands of hours along the way longing for unconsciousness, longing for a rubber mallet to crack me in the head, not so hard, not hard enough to do any damage, just a good whack to put me down for the night.

Proponents of strong AI, such as Marvin Minsky, have long thought that consciousness could exist on a silicon platform. Like Ray Kurzweil, he may well be encouraged to download his consciousness to a computer chip no larger than the head of a pin—a perfect fit, as his phrenologist would say.

The Private Life of the Brain (New York: John Wiley, 2000); John McCrone's Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness (London: Faber and Faber, 1999) is a more easygoing, detailed exploration. David Hubel's Eye, Brain and Vision (San Francisco: Scientific American Library, 1988) is a fine vision of what seeing entails, presented by the scientist who did much to reveal

Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement.

Ultimately, all moments are really one, therefore now is an eternity.

The question is how our own meanings are related to those of the universe as a whole. We could say that our action toward the whole universe is a result of what it means to be us.

In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement.

The notion that the one who thinks (the Ego) is at least in principle completely separate from and independent of the reality that he thinks about is of course firmly embedded in our entire tradition.

The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion.

There's a terror in knowing what the world is about

We cannot attain the presence of God. We're already totally in the presence of God. What's missing is awareness.

The shock of public hostility served as a stimulant. It made them acutely conscious of how society functioned.

Sin is a necessary piece of our mental furniture because it reminds us that life is a moral affair.

That came from his tapes. We questioned everything we did. He instilled or reinforced in us quality consciousness. If you're going to do something, you have to absolutely achieve excellence and set your internal compass toward excellence and go for that, because nothing else matters." The process, though, could be rough.

What Your Speed Means

As someone who believes that much of the source of his work and creativity is to be gleaned from those bubbles, it's a reliable place to find that connection. In the same way that perplexing problems sometimes get resolved in one's sleep, when the conscious mind is distracted the unconscious works things out.

Though there are exceptions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism tend to stress desirable states of consciousness, escaping the fretful, self-aware state of mind that so often makes everyday living a burden. For mystics from the Abrahamic faiths, however, the inward odyssey is also an upward odyssey, a quest for personal and vital communion with an infinite Being.

Darwinians, then, have never paid, or even acknowledged, the debt they have all along owed the public: a reconciliation of their teleological explanations of particular adaptations with their non-teleological explanation of adaptation in general. And not only have they never paid this debt: they have in fact become progressively less conscious, with time, of the fact that they owe this debt. This

Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them.

Memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world.

Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?