Quotes About Consciousness

What is it that we can do with conscious thought that cannot be done unconsciously? The problem is made more elusive by the fact that anything that we do seem originally to require consciousness for appears also to be able to be learnt and then later carried out unconsciously (perhaps by the cerebellum

Every one of our conscious brains is woven from subtle physical ingredients that somehow enable us to take advantage of the profound organization of our mathematically underpinned universe-so that we, in turn, are capable of some kind of direct access, through that Platonic quality of 'understanding', to the very ways in which our universe behaves at many different levels.

Thus, Godel appears to have taken it as evident that the physical brain must itself behave computationally, but that the mind is something beyond the brain, so that the mind's action is not constrained to behave according to the computational laws that he believed must control the physical brain's behavior.

Awareness, I take to be one aspect-the passive aspect-of the phenomenon of consciousness. Consciousness has an active aspect also, namely the feeling of free will.

do not see how natural selection, in itself, can evolve algorithms which could have the kind of conscious judgements of the validity of other algorithms that we seem to have.

Support for the Platonic viewpoint (as opposed to the formalist one) was an important part of Godel's initial motivations. On the other hand, the arguments from Godel's theorem serve to illustrate the deeply mysterious nature of our mathematical perceptions. We do not just 'calculate' in order to form these perceptions, but something else is profoundly involved-something that would be impossible without the very conscious awareness that is, after all, what the world of perceptions is all about.

Perhaps it is conceivable that, in the future, some different kind of 'computer' might be introduced, that makes critical use of continuous physical parameters-albeit within the standard theoretical framework of today's physics-enabling it to behave in a way that is essentially different from a digital computer.

Although it might well be possible for a sufficiently cleverly constructed such system to preserve an illusion, for some considerable time (as with Deep Thought), that it possesses some understanding, I shall maintain that a computer system's actual lack of understanding should-in principle, at least-eventually reveal itself.

Any complicated activity, which may be mathematical calculations, or playing a game of chess, or commonplace actions-if they have been understood in terms of clear-cut computational rules-are the things that modern computers are good at; but the very understanding that underlies these computational rules is something that is itself beyond computation.

In the present chapter, we tried to pinpoint the place in the brain where quantum action might be important to classical behaviour, and have apparently been driven to consider that it is through the cytoskeletal control of synaptic connections that this quantum/classical interface exerts its fundamental influence on the brain's behaviour.

Does awareness play some kind of role as a 'bridge' to a world of Platonic absolutes.

The judgement-forming that I am claiming is the hallmark of consciousness is itself something that the AI people would have no concept of how to program on a computer.

there seems to be something non-algorithmic about our conscious thinking. In particular, a conclusion from the argument in Chapter 4, particularly concerning Gödel's theorem, was that, at least in mathematics, conscious contemplation can sometimes enable one to ascertain the truth of a statement in a way that no algorithm could.

In view of the anomalous relation that consciousness has to the very physical notion of time, as was described at the beginning of this section, it seems to me to be at least possible that there is no such clear-cut 'time' at which a conscious event must occur.

The identification of any object in the first-person case is ruled out by the enterprise of scientific explanation. So science cannot tell me who I am, let alone where, when, or how.

The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas.

anamnesis: the bringing to consciousness of forgotten things.

Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind.

the mind, to borrow Hume's metaphor, 'spreads itself upon objects'.

In a sense you are always more clearly aware than I can be of what I am in the world; and when I confront my own face, there may be a moment of fear, as I try to fit the person whom I know so well to this thing that others know better

how can I know the world as it is? I can have knowledge of the world as it seems, since that is merely knowledge of my present perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings. But can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of how it seems? To put the question in slightly more general form: can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of my own point of view?

And so I acquired the consciousness of death and dying, without which the world cannot be loved for what it is. That, in essence, is what it means to be a conservative.

realities instead.

It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only - or even at all - in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way.