Quotes About Consciousness

What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.

The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences. It responds to information from the senses, including the exhortations of other people. You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you.

Whether information and computation explain consciousness, in addition to knowledge, intelligence, and purpose, is a question I'll turn to in the final chapter.)

No one can fail to recognize the influence of the doctrine of the Noble Savage in contemporary consciousness. We see it in the current respect for all things natural (natural foods, natural medicines, natural childbirth) and the distrust of the man-made, the unfashionability of authoritarian styles of childrearing and education, and the understanding of social problems as repairable defects in our institutions rather than as tragedies inherent to the human condition.

Relativists have a point when they say that we don't just open our eyes and apprehend reality, as if perception were a window through which the soul gazes at the world. The idea that we just see things as they are is called naïve realism, and it was refuted by skeptical philosophers thousands of years ago with the help of a simple phenomenon: visual illusions.

Self-deception is an exotic theory, because it makes the paradoxical claim that something called "the self" can be both deceiver and deceived.

nothing invests life with more meaning than the realization that every moment of sentience is a precious gift.

The Devil's Dictionary, the mind has nothing but itself to know itself with, and it may never feel satisfied that it understands the deepest aspect of its own existence, its intrinsic subjectivity.

But consciousness or sentience, the raw sensation of toothaches and redness and saltiness and middle C, is still a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

En resumen, sin la posibilidad de sufrir, lo que tendríamos no sería una dicha armoniosa, sino que, al contrario, careceríamos por completo de conciencia.

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life and death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness and answer any question we are capable of asking. We cannot hold ten thousand words in short-term memory. We cannot see in ultraviolet light. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience.

We're here to learn how to worship consciousness and radiance, evoke it in each other, and tolerate nothing less than our deepest love.

Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.

Love is the recognition of oneness in the world of duality.

There is no greater power than the power of love, which arises from Presence. It overcomes all resistance.

You want a love which is born out of meditation, not born out of the mind.

The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.

Only the free mind knows what Love is.

Just stopping, is a radical act of sanity and love.

Love is not an emotion. It is your very existence.

If you can grow in love, you will grow in awareness. If you grow in awareness, you will grow in love.

You can't find the sound if you just love sleep.