Quotes About Consciousness

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

This is it. The final conscious experience. Enjoy it while it lasts.

We're not thinking machines, we're—we're feeling machines that happen to think.

At least one theory suggests that while great apes and adult Humans are sentient, young Human children are not.101 I admit to a certain fondness for this conclusion; if childen aren't nonsentient, they're certainly psychopathic). But

I was trying to get a handle on Blindsight; I entertained and discarded any number of adaptive functions in search of that grand thematic punchline that would end the book. Yes, my protagonist would realize, self-awareness is absolutely essential because of X. The problem was, I couldn't find an X that stood up under scrutiny; and it took me far too long to realize that Consciousness is good for nothing at all was the scariest and most existentially gut-churning punchline imaginable.

TO HIMSELF EVERYONE IS IMMORTAL; HE MAY KNOW THAT HE IS GOING TO DIE, BUT HE CAN NEVER KNOW THAT HE IS DEAD. —

consciousness] Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterward, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system. I

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half asses way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on try. We focus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back

So much more aware, so much less perceptive. An automaton could do better.

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.

Grey syndrome.

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.

If there's one thing I'm the world's greatest expert on, it's how it feels to be me. And

THE HUMAN BRAIN WERE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULD UNDERSTAND IT, WE WOULD BE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULDN'T. —Emerson M. Pugh

Nie jesteÅ›my myÅ›lÄ…cymi maszynami, jesteÅ›my czujÄ…cymi maszynami, które przypadkiem myÅ›lÄ….

We're the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.

I could be the only sentient being in the universe. If I'm even that much. Because I don't know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator.

Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.

consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition.

Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

With this assumption of awareness and responsibility, increased response-ability becomes possible. This means that the more fully I can become aware of who I am and what I am doing at this moment, the more freedom I can experience to change and the more I am able to choose my responses.