Quotes About Consciousness

The first is that every one of us identifies with a point of view in the world.

The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience.

What makes it so—that I am Carlo—and that my hair and my nails and my feet are considered part of me, as well as my anger and my dreams, and that I consider myself to be the same Carlo as yesterday, the same as tomorrow; the one who thinks, suffers, and perceives?

Augustine's exposition of the idea is quite beautiful. It is based on our experience of music. When we listen to a hymn, the meaning of a sound is given by the ones that come before and after it. 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.

And hence this is what time is: it is entirely in the present, in our minds, as memory and as anticipation.

Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. 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.

Is there not perhaps a contradiction between our feeling of freedom and the rigor, as we now understand it, with which things operate in the world?

The present is a localized rather than a global phenomenon.

But in physics there is nothing that corresponds to the notion of the "now.

This is the disconcerting conclusion that emerges from Boltzmann's work: the difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world. It's a conclusion that leaves us flabbergasted: Is it really possible that a perception so vivid, basic, existential—my perception of the passage of time—depends on the fact that I cannot apprehend the world in all of its minute detail?

What is the 'present'? We say that only the things of the present exist: the past no longer exists and the future doesn't exist yet. But in physics there is nothing that corresponds to the notion of the 'now'.

There is not one single time; there is a vast multitude of them.

Se il mondo è un un pullulare di effimeri quanti di spazio e di materia, un immenso gioco a incastri di spazio e particelle elementari, noi cosa siamo? [...] Nel grande quadro della scienza contemporanea ci sono molte cose che non capiamo, e una di quelle che capiamo meno siamo noi stessi

Why do we remember the past and not the future? Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us? What does it really mean to say that time "passes"? What ties time to our nature as persons, to our subjectivity? What am I listening to when I listen to the passing of time?

due to the limitations of our consciousness we perceive only a blurred vision of the world and live in time.

That which makes us specifically human does not signify our separation from nature; it is part of that self-same nature. It's a form that nature has taken here on our planet, in the infinite play of its combinations, through the reciprocal influencing and exchanging of correlations and information among its parts.

Time is a strange thing. When we don't need it, it is nothing. Then suddenly, there is nothing else. It is everywhere around us. Also, within us. It seeps into our faces. It seeps into the mirror, runs through my temples. Between you and I it runs silently like an hourglass.

What role do we have as human beings who perceive, make decisions, laugh, and cry, in this great fresco of the world as depicted by contemporary physics?

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 the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this inmense, chaotic universe.

In the big picture of contemporary science, there are many things that we do not understand, and one of the things that we understand least about is ourselves.

To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves.

Time is an effect of our overlooking the physical microstates of things. Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance.

Why do we remember the past and not the future?

If the present has no meaning, then what "exists" in the universe? Is not what "exists" precisely what is here "in the present"?