Quotes About Consciousness

I have total recall. I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.

Man is unique in creation because he has a sense of justice and truth.

She thought in pictures and feelings, not words.

She did not think policeman—she simply watched and took in images, sounds, sensations.

So the real answer to any fundamental question is experience itself.

By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.

Even by common wisdom, there seem to be both people and objects in my dream that are outside myself, but clearly they were created in myself and are part of me, they are mental constructs in my own brain.

If the mind were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.

If we were magically shrunk and put into someone's brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers! —G. W. LEIBNIZ (1646–1716)

Our human intelligence is based on computational processes that we are learning to understand. We will ultimately multiply our intellectual powers by applying and extending the methods of human intelligence using the vastly greater capacity of nonbiological computation. So to consider the ultimate limits of computation is really to ask: what is the destiny of our civilization?

Ultimately, we will be able to port our mental processes to a more suitable computational substrate. Then our minds won't have to stay so small.

In the latest brain image studies, we can see real-time movies of individual interneuronal connections actually creating new synapses (connection points between neurons), so we can see our brain create our thoughts and in turn see our thoughts create our brain.

If we were building a consciousness detector, Searle would want it to ascertain that it was squirting biological neurotransmitters. American philosopher Daniel Dennett (born in 1942) would be more flexible on substrate, but might want to determine whether or not the system contained a model of itself and of its own performance. That view comes closer to my own, but at its core is still a philosophical assumption.

it could be simply an accident of fate that our brains are too weak to understand themselves. Think of the lowly giraffe, for instance, whose brain is obviously far below the level required for self-understanding—yet it is remarkably similar to our brain.

Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to our deepest longings and greatest accomplishments. —LEON KASS, CHAIR OF THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON BIOETHICS, 2003

Machines can pool their resources, intelligence, and memories. Two machines—or one million machines—can join together to become one and then become separate again. Multiple machines can do both at the same time: become one and separate simultaneously. Humans call this falling in love, but our biological ability to do this is fleeting and unreliable.

Fredkin was quoted by Robert Wright in the 1980s as saying, There are three great philosophical questions. What is life? What is consciousness and thinking and memory and all that? And how does the universe work? …

Ray Kurzweil La Singularidad está cerca Cuando los humanos transcendamos la biología

Dreams are real while they last; can we say more of life? —HAVELOCK ELLIS

we are constantly predicting the future and hypothesizing what we will experience. This expectation influences what we actually perceive. Predicting the future is actually the primary reason that we have a brain.

Moreover, the detailed arrangement of connections and synapses in a given region is a direct product of how extensively that region is used. As brain scanning has attained sufficiently high resolution to detect dendritic-spine growth and the formation of new synapses, we can see our brain grow and adapt to literally follow our thoughts. This gives new shades of meaning to Descartes' dictum "I think therefore I am.

a mind is a brain that is conscious.

While I probably should have mentioned that you shouldn't try this in a real moving car (but then I assume you have already mastered the rule that you shouldn't drive with your eyes closed), that's not really the key problem here.

we each appear to have two brains, not one, and we can do pretty well with either.