Quotes About Consciousness

You can shoot a barracuda between the eyes and it won't go to hell because it doesn't know where or what hell is...)

The area dividing the brain and the soul Is affected in many ways by experience — Some lose all mind and become soul: insane. Some lose all soul and become mind: intellectual. Some lose both and become: accepted.

THEN MY DESK phone rang and I awakened.

Casi siempre lo mejor de la vida consistía en no hacer nada en absoluto, en pasar el rato reflexionando, rumiando sobre ello. Quiero decir que pongamos que uno comprende que todo es absurdo, entones no puede ser tan absurdo porque uno es consciente de que es absurdo y la conciencia de ellos es lo que le otorga sentido. ¿Me entienden? Es un pesimismo optimista.

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

We stop looking for monsters under our beds when we realize they are inside us.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—of approving of some and disapproving of others.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

Die Tiere empfinden wie der Mensch Freude und Schmerz, Glück und Unglück.

The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals

method of thinking.

This inexhaustible mind substance is available at all times and in all places to those who have learned to lay hold of it in consciousness. The simplest, shortest, and most direct way of doing this was explained when Jesus said, Whosoever ... shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that what he saith cometh to pass, he shall have it.

Or maybe it is only that we are so habitually inattentive that when some rare but simple geometry grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us into consciousness, we call our response sacred.

our inner selves can't help but come along

But by fusing the best of both sides, a kind of intertwining consciousness arises—grandmother and granddaughter wisdom emerging from shared hope, relieved of emotions tainted by control and guilt and anger.

Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons -- literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd. (331)

Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.

First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life—oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness.

To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality.

I am me and I have been Juliette and both of us have dreamed this dream repeatedly. And what makes this dream so unfortunate is that it is a true thing that happened to someone else ... who is both of us.

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience—it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.

If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?)

zimboe—a zombie with no self-awareness, but programmed to claim to be aware in an attempt to deceive the truly conscious beings around it.

We are medium-sized mammals who only prosper because we've developed a half-arsed ability to terraform the less suitable bits of the planet we evolved on, and we're conscious of our inevitable decay and death, and we can't live anywhere else. There is no invisible sky daddy to give us immortal life and a harp and wings when we die.