Quotes About Consciousness

the world manipulates you, in the end you realize that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks.

mundane feelings of heat and itching are every bit as mysterious as feelings of rapture or cosmic oneness.

Pain is pain, fear is fear, and love is love—even in the matrix.

To the best of our knowledge, only Sapiens can cooperate in very flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. This concrete capability – rather than an eternal soul or some unique kind of consciousness – explains our mastery of planet Earth.

The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?', but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.

What is a spaceship compared to an eternally young cyborg who does not breed and has no sexuality, who can share thoughts directly with other beings, whose abilities to focus and remember are a thousand times greater than our own, and who is never angry or sad, but has emotions and desires that we cannot begin to imagine?

But the soul has no parts. You might argue that human souls did not evolve, but appeared one bright day in the fullness of their glory. But when exactly was that bright day?

Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master.

Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny. A conscious effort has to be made to sustain laws, customs, procedures and manners, otherwise the social order would quickly collapse.

solo Homo sapiens puede hablar sobre cosas que no existen realmente, y creerse seis cosas imposibles antes del desayuno.

Just as the spectrums of light and sound are far broader than what we humans can see and hear, so the spectrum of mental states is far larger than what the average human perceives.

If] you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or with the inner story of the self. Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind [...]. People ask 'Who am I?' and expect to be told a story. The first thing you need to know about yourself, is that you are not a story.

This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.

The study of the human mind has so far assumed that Homo sapiens is Homer Simpson.

Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu, and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank account; they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that's not even half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.

los humanos deben extraer de sus experiencias internas no solo el sentido de su propia vida, sino también el sentido del universo entero.

La escritura nació como la criada de la conciencia humana, pero cada vez más se está convirtiendo en su dueña y señora.

But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?', but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.

Los científicos no saben cómo un conjunto de señales eléctricas en el cerebro crea experiencias subjetivas. Y, lo que es más importante, tampoco saben cuál podría ser el beneficio evolutivo de semejante fenómeno. Es la mayor laguna en nuestra comprensión de la vida.

The humanities, in contrast, emphasise the crucial importance of intersubjective entities, which cannot be reduced to hormones and neurons. To think historically means to ascribe real power to the contents of our imaginary stories.

relationship between humans and a small group of ethereal

Por qué hay algo, en lugar de nada? ¿Qué modeló las leyes fundamentales de la física? ¿Qué es la conciencia y de dónde procede? No tenemos respuestas para estas preguntas, y damos a nuestra ignorancia el nombre grandioso de Dios.

The basic plot of almost all movies and novels about AI revolves around the magical moment when a computer or a robot gains consciousness.

intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. We tend to confuse the two because in humans and other mammals intelligence goes hand in hand with consciousness. Mammals solve most problems by feeling things. Computers, however, solve problems in a very different way.