Quotes About Consciousness

Ignoring our emotions is turning our back on reality.

human. To minimize

The war between light and darkness is not fought between countries, ethnic groups, or religious factions, but waged within each of us, every day.

The plucked and dressed bodies of the chickens will then be sold to millions of families who will gnaw on their bones without pausing for an instant to think that they are eating the dead body of a once living creature, or to ask what was done to that creature in order to enable them to buy and eat its body.

We are in an outside that carries inner worlds.

Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.

Wer komplexe Wirklichkeit leugnet, gibt sich gern objektiv und bezichtigt die Problembewussten der Wirklichkeitsflucht und der Träumerei.

To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.

This complex structure, in which people were required to predict the behaviour of others in social situations, is generally regarded as the mechanism by which consciousness evolved. In predicting the behaviour of others, an individual would have acquired a sense of self.

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones.

After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.

At least one theory suggests that while great apes and adult Humans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to a certain fondness for this conclusion; if childen aren't nonsentient, they're certainly psychopathic)

The neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness.

She can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.

Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. You can't imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn't even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can't quite put your finger on.

They never experience the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it.

You said it was colorful. What changed?" "I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just— I don't actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more." "So how do you know you still have them?" Pag asked. Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. "I know." "How?" I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered. "I wake up smiling," I said.

PROBLEMS CANNOT BE SOLVED AT THE SAME LEVEL OF AWARENESS THAT CREATED THEM. –ALBERT EINSTEIN

You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Long before art and science and philosophy arose, consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition. In a submerged body starving for air, it's difficult to imagine two imperatives more opposed than the need to breathe and the need to hold your breath. As one Prismatic told me, "Put yourself in one of those things, and tell me you aren't more intensely conscious than you've ever been in your life.

You might just decide that one life lived on your own recognizance is better than a million unremembered births.

Brain's got all kinds of gauges. You can know you're blind even when you're not; you can know you can see, even when you're blind. And yeah, you can know you don't exist even when you do. It's a long list, commissar. Cotard's, Anton's, Damascus disease. Just for starters.