Quotes About Consciousness

The human brain is a wonderful thought-producing machine. It turns out millions of thoughts every day. Most of the time, this makes our lives much easier. But unfortunately, we can't fully control what our brain thinks about.

There's that first few seconds, right when you wake up in the morning, when your head is absolutely clear. It's like a computer booting up—its screen perfectly clean and white—before the train wreck of your desktop clogs everything up with its disorganized jumble of crap.

I know nothing," I say, cheerfully. "You never seem to. Have you ever wondered why that is?" "It's very deliberate. I've found that knowledge is usually a burden. I prefer to be surprised and then eventually horrified.

What's the use of having eyes if we can't see the world we pass through?

Why do any animals scream when they are wounded or killed, even when those screams can have no possible utility? Why do we scream, and why has evolution designed us to consciously experience our physical pain, but not them?

When standard agricultural practice treats billions of animals as unfeeling flesh, at the very moment when humankind has established beyond reasonable doubt their conscious mental and emotional lives, it is no good to go on as if nothing had changed.

Another determined skeptic of animal awarenss write that the definition of consciousness has eluded us for over a century. But this isn't the problem at all. The problem is that as animals meet the old definitions, like conscious pain and deliberate communication, the experts keep making up new definitions.

The difference is that whereas hey defer to common sense, empathy, and decency in the case of human consciousness, in the case of animals they do the opposite. The creatures are held to an impossible standard of evidence, an ever receding empirical horizon, allowing us to declare in theory that since we can never really know how they think and feel, we may safely conclude that they do not and act accordingly.

If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even where animals are concerned.

When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs just too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that here what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.

For all we know it, their pain may sometimes seem more immediate, blunt, arbitrary, and inescapable than ours. Walk through an animal shelter or a slaughterhouse and you wonder if animal suffering might not at times be all the more terrifying and all-encompassing without benefit of the words and concepts that for us, after all, confer not only meaning but consolation. Whatever is going on inside their heads, it doesn't seem mere to them.

I don't want to think anymore. Thinking prevents you from living.

to you, unknown corporeal interlocutor who I hope is just kind of out there somehow knowing my thoughts and undertaking your own heroic struggle against the exigencies of having a body made of a trillion cells each with a hungry mouth [...]

Meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree. It completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are.

The truth is that even if resentment is triggered by an external object, it is not located anywhere else but in our mind.

Do not breathe simply to exist.

Even though she had been warned, she tripped over the bike. She probably tripped because she'd been warned and was telling herself not to trip over the bike. She did that sometimes. It was often easier not to know what obstacles were in the way.

Games are not fun when you don't know you're playing.

How does this keep happening to you?" David said. "Because I look," Stevie replied. "A lot of things happen when you go out and do them on purpose.

Mostly, Stevie forgot she had a body, and when someone else noticed her body, it made her look down and go, huh. Would you look at that. How long has that been there?

We all know what we're doing. Whether we realize it or not.

The words seemed to come from a place deep inside me, far beyond the place where I stored them, past the ideas.

She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth . . . To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience . . . and the desire would never be satisfied, except by a being of equal greatness.

Art is inextricably tied to man's survival - not to his physical survival, but to that on which his physical survival depends: to the preservation and survival of his consciousness.