Quotes About Consciousness

Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.

S]omeone else is breathing in here besides me, and I don't think Tim the cowman dabs . . . lily of the valley, is it . . . behind his ears. Although he should.

Man 'knows', which is why he is always two : his life and his knowing.

Io lo so che parlo perché parlo," (I know I am talking because I'm talking.)

A gastronome who isn't an environmentalist is just stupid, and an environmentalist who isn't a gastronome is just sad.

We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.

We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes...

If I ask whether two events—one on Earth and the other on Proxima b—are happening "at the same moment," the correct answer would be: "It's a question that doesn't make sense, because there is no such thing as 'the same moment' definable in the universe." The "present of the universe" is meaningless.

We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward predicting events in the future, toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this immense, chaotic universe.

We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is being in time.

We have a hundred billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in a galaxy, with an even more astronomical number of links and potential combinations through which they can interact. We are not conscious of all of this. "We" are the process formed by this entire intricacy, not just by the little of it of which we are conscious.

Quantum theory is of no direct help in understanding the mind.

what does it mean, our being free to make decisions, if our behavior does nothing but follow the predetermined laws of nature?

Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance.

There is not an "I" and "the neurons in my brain." They are the same thing.

think of how many millions of details our eyes see every moment that do not stay in our memory-but one which contains worlds. Boundless worlds. They are those worlds that the young Marcel rediscovers, bewildered, every morning, in the first pages of Remembrances of Things Past, in the vertigo of the moment when consciousness emerges like a bubble from unfathomable depths.

Time opens up our limited access to the world. Time, then, is the form in which we beings, whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight, interact with the world: it is the source of identity.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion." Illusion

Time is our ignorance.

Our "present" does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a bubble around us.

We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality.

I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.

Music can occur only in time, but if we are always in the present moment, how is it possible to hear it? It is possible, Augustine observes, because our consciousness is based on memory and on anticipation.

We are processes, events, composite and limited in space and time. But if we are not an individual entity, what is it that founds our identity and its unity?