Quotes About Consciousness

Work by physiology professor Benjamin Libet at the University of California at Davis shows that neural activity to initiate an action actually occurs about a third of a second before the brain has made the decision to take the action.

Yes, well, the subjective experience is the opposite of the objective reality

The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis";

Por alguna razón, la gente que tiene muchísimo dinero suele ser la que menos paga. Eso me pone malo, y entonces pago aún más, para que no se me note.

Hay algo que he aprendido en todos estos años: puedes dormir en cualquier parte pero no puedes despertarte en cualquier parte.

we each construct our own reality by interpreting the external world on the basis of our unique experiences with it and our beliefs about those experiences.

the thing that "makes us human. We have minds. We make our own choices and live by them. We shape our own lives with how we behave towards others.

We feel (God's) presence every time we make a choice. It's something that's inside us.

The soul began as unquestionably real and the self ended as arguably a fiction.

Il y a des rêves qui se déroulent comme des incidents sans importance, de la vie éveillée on ne retiendrait pas des choses comme ça et cependant ils intéressent lorsqu'on les saisit au matin se poussant en désordre contre la porte des paupières.

The errors of muddling correlation with causation, necessary condition with sufficient causation, and sufficient causation with identity lie at the heart of the neuromaniac's basic assumption that consciousness and nerve impulses are one and the same, and that (to echo a commonly used formulation) "the mind is a creation of the brain".

The point is that our difference from beasts is wall to wall, permeating every moment of our day.

Libet's experiment illustrates how the (neuro-)determinist case against freedom is based on a very distorted conception of what constitutes an action in everyday

So it is no surprise that we cannot find free will in this isolated movement in a laboratory, if we treat it as an isolated movement.

The desire to minimize human uniqueness has prompted exaggerated claims about animal tool use, about their range and mode of communication and their sense of each other, about their putative beliefs and other modes of thought. However, the monuments of collective endeavour seen in the animal kingdom – for example the heaps created by termites – are the result not of conscious deliberation but of dovetailing automaticities.

We cannot, to use the jargon, find "the neural correlates of consciousness" (NCC): more precisely, identify an adequate basis for the difference between neural activity that is, and neural activity that isn't, associated with consciousness.

It is intentionality that tears the seamless fabric of the causally closed material world.

The lengths that post-analytical philosophers of mind have gone to in order to avoid acknowledging contents of consciousness have been extraordinary.

Qualia are difficult, propositional attitudes are difficult, selves are difficult, so away they must go: they cannot be accommodated in the third-person neurophilosophical framework that combines scientism with an analytical outlook that prefers concepts to consciousness, placing consciousness-free language at the heart of the human mind.[

Intentionality highlights the mystery of what brains are, ultimately, supposed to do; namely, to make other items, indeed worlds, appear to someone.

The events in computers do not amount to genuine understanding. Indeed, given that symbols are symbols only to someone who understands that they are symbols, events in computers considered in isolation from conscious human beings do not even amount to the processing of symbols. There is merely the passage of minute electric currents along circuits which may or may not cause other physical events to happen, such as the lighting up of a screen in a certain pattern.

But even those who locate the roots of consciousness in the brain should still recognize that brains together create a space that cannot be stuffed back into the brain.

Trying to discover the contents of our ordinary Wednesdays in the tropisms of the evolved organism as reflected in brain activity is like applying one's ear to a seed and expecting to hear the rustling of the woods in a breeze.

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.