Quotes About Consciousness

Being a thing with a central nervous system complex enough to understand the concept of being a thing with a central nervous system. Simply being. Consider all the inanimate

has a control system so perilously close to intelligence that a government agent must be on hand at all times, ready to destroy the machine if it slips over the threshold into consciousness.

Weyl curvature tensor . . . but consciousness was no

the incantations which could shatter a mind into ones and zeros; pure number.

It was better to live; better to carry a memory of a memory, than suffer the vast burden of knowing. He was not meant to think like a god.

No," I said emphatically. "Not in a million years. I might not be human. I might be nothing more than a set of algorithms, running on a spacesuit with a corpse inside it. But I'm not a monster.

While we have to take personal responsibility for our actions, I have a great deal of empathy for people who are unconsciously racially biased, and indeed count myself among their number.

A multiple personality is in a certain sense normal.

I personally am not conscious of my accent.

Personally, what scares me most is the thoughtlessness the Internet can perpetuate.

I absolutely love Oprah Winfrey. What a great woman and a great businesswoman. She seems to really campaign for an expansion of global consciousness. I think she's phenomenal.

Many philosophers say it's impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that's not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It's just that they haven't explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about.

We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

I always say that I don't want to be sentimental, that the photographs shouldn't be sentimental, and yet, I am conscious of my sentimentality.

I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography.

The really explicit phrase is doors of perception.

I believe we have a physical body and a soul. It doesn't matter what religion you are, whether or not you believe in God. I think people believe that there is a soul and a body.

The sense of being a separate, egoic self begins with the astral, not with the physical, body. The soul is individualized spirit.

I know there's a consciousness energy that operates completely independent of the physical body you inhabit, that maintains... awareness after the body's gone.

The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.

Fear of nothingness is fear of a certain physicality, a physicality whose phenomena I cannot predictably demarcate from its reality in advance.

When you're the conscious captain in your kitchen, you'll feel better mentally and physically.

No inanimate object is ever fully determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.