Quotes About Consciousness

I shall suggest, on the contrary, that all communication relies, to a noticeable extent on evoking knowledge that we cannot tell, and that all our knowledge of mental processes, like feelings or conscious intellectual activities, is based on a knowledge which we cannot tell.

For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.

We can never know everything," Holmes said, "but I fear that everything knows us.

By invoking and receiving energies of consciousness of a higher quality from transpersonal levels, we can in turn affect the vibratory quality of the substance of our personality fields and contribute to their evolution, thus perfecting our instrument of expression.

The surest symptoms of a wasted life are breathing, a pulse, and thinking...

It was the most important moment in human history, the telling of the first lie. That's what separates us from the other animals. It has nothing to do with humans thinking on a higher plane or having easily available credit. We lie to each other. We deliberately mislead.

Possessing a theory of mind means that an individual ascribes mental states, such as purpose, intention, knowledge, beliefs, doubts, pretending, liking, and so forth, to himself and to others.

First, we contend that conscious or mental phenomena are dynamic, emergent, pattern (or configurational) properties of the living brain in action—

According to Panksepp, seven primal emotional and motivational feelings that appear to be common features of animal and human consciousness at both a behavioral and a neural level are SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, GRIEF, and PLAY.

I am not suggesting that single cells are conscious. I am suggesting that they may have some type of processing that is necessary or similar to the processing that results in conscious experience.

I will argue that consciousness is not a thing. "Consciousness" is the word we use to describe the subjective feeling of a number of instincts and/or memories playing out in time in an organism. That is why "consciousness" is a proxy word for how a complex living organism operates. And, to understand how complex organisms work, we need to know how brains' parts are organized to deliver conscious experience as we know it.

John-Dylan Haynes22 and his colleagues expanded Libet's experiments in 2008 to show that the outcomes of an inclination can be encoded in brain activity up to ten seconds before it enters awareness! The brain has acted before its person is conscious of it. Not only that, from looking at the scan, they can make a prediction about what the person is going to do. The implications of this are rather staggering.

This incessant interplay between cognition and feelings, which is to say between cortical and subcortical modules, produces what we call consciousness.

Plainly stated, I believe consciousness is an instinct.

What exactly is the role of the cerebral cortex in producing consciousness? The cortex expands the number of ways in which we can experience the world, which allows for a vast variety of possible conscious experiences and responses.

chapter, however, the modern perspective is that brains enable minds, and that YOU is your vastly parallel and distributed brain without a central command center. There is no ghost in the machine, no secret stuff that is YOU. That YOU that you are so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behavior as it can incorporate, and it denies or rationalizes the rest.

After a tour of the wards, it begins to look like consciousness is not a system property at all. It is a property of local brain circuits.

While the list of chimp tricks is long and dazzling, does this make them conscious beings in the same sense that humans are conscious? This is probably an ill-posed question. Perhaps the question should be "Does our conscious experience hold similar contents to that of a chimp?

How on earth does lifeless matter become the building blocks for living things? How do neurons turn into minds? What should be the vocabulary used to describe the interactions between the brain and its mind? When humankind finds some answers, will we be disheartened by what they are? Will our future understanding of "consciousness" simply not be fulfilling? Will it be simple yet cold and harsh?

Or really, the question is: Is there a difference between when life begins and when life as a human begins?

Hence at any moment only part of the visual elements of a scene is available for conscious perception.

Libet has provided us with an intriguing possible mechanism for explaining why we think we are doing in real time things that we have in fact already done.

So before you are aware that you're thinking about moving your arm, your brain is at work preparing to make that movement!

Awareness is the ultimate sacred wonder.