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Quotes About Consciousness

Ironically, the better we map this process, the harder it becomes to explain conscious feelings. The better we understand the brain, the more redundant the mind seems. If the entire system works by electric signals passing from here to there, why the hell do we also need to feel fear?
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Perhaps I am the only being in the entire universe who feels anything, and all other humans and animals are just mindless robots? Perhaps I am dreaming, and everyone I meet is just a character in my dream? Perhaps I am trapped inside a virtual world, and all the beings I see are merely simulations?
~ Yuval Noah Harari
How do you know if an entity is real? Very simple – just ask yourself, 'Can it suffer?
~ Yuval Noah Harari
for every dollar and every minute we invest in improving artificial intelligence, it would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute in advancing human consciousness
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love and anger.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
We are researching and developing human abilities mainly according to the immediate needs of the economic and political system, rather than according to our own long-term needs as conscious beings.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Turing knew from personal experience that it didn't matter who you really were – it mattered only what others thought about you. According to Turing, in the future computers would be just like gay men in the 1950s. It won't matter whether computers will actually be conscious or not. It will matter only what people think about it. The
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers. And
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Maybe it isn't so important whether people's expectations are fulfilled and whether they enjoy pleasant feelings. The main question is whether people know the truth about themselves. What evidence do we have that people today understand this truth any better than ancient foragers or medieval peasants?
~ Yuval Noah Harari
online giants tend to view humans as audiovisual animals – a pair of eyes and a pair of ears connected to ten fingers, a screen and a credit card. A crucial step towards uniting humankind is to appreciate that humans have bodies.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
If any scientist wants to argue that subjective experiences are irrelevant, their challenge is to explain why torture or rape are wrong without reference to any subjective experience.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
It turns out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted "human intuition" is in reality "pattern recognition.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Quando a mente aprende a enxergar nossas sensações tais como elas são — ou seja, vibrações efêmeras e inexpressivas —, perdemos o interesse em persegui-las. Pois qual o sentido de correr atrás de algo que desaparece tão rápido quanto surge?
~ Yuval Noah Harari
?nsan?n hissetme, dü?ünme, arzulama ve icat etme özgürlü?ünü k?s?tlayan her ?ey evrenin anlam?n? k?s?tlar.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Consciousness is the biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes. Jet engines roar loudly, but the noise doesn't propel the aeroplane forward. Humans don't need carbon dioxide, but each and every breath fills the air with more of the stuff. Similarly, consciousness may be a kind of mental pollution produced by the firing of complex neural networks. It doesn't do anything. It is just there.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
At the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, pilgrims were greeted by the inscription: 'Know thyself!' The implication was that the average person is ignorant of his true self, and is therefore likely to be ignorant of true happiness. Freud would probably concur.*
~ Yuval Noah Harari
When we say 'I', we mean the story in our head, not the onrushing stream of experiences we undergo.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Most people presume that reality is either objective or subjective, and that there is no third option. Hence once they satisfy themselves that something isn't just their own subjective feeling, they jump to the conclusion it must be objective.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans. We
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Hayvan-insan ili?kisi, gelecekte süperinsanlarla insanlar aras?nda kurulacak ili?kiye en yak?n model olma özelli?i ta??r. Süperzeki siborglar?n etten kemikten, s?radan insanlara nas?l davranaca??n? m? merak ediyorsunuz? ?nsanlar?n daha az zeki hayvan akrabalar?na nas?l davrand???yla ba?lamak sa?l?kl? olabilir.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
Homo sapiens can speak about things that don't really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth. Radioactive emissions occurred long before people discovered them, and they are dangerous even when people do not believe in them.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual. It disappears or changes if that particular individual changes his or her beliefs.
~ Yuval Noah Harari