Quotes About Consciousness

The perfect man sees nothing but God.

Man cannot always think of matter, however pleasurable it may be.

Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.

If the body dies, it does no harm to the mind, but if the mind dies, one can no longer act as a man even though the body survives.

Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.

Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.

I-man say don't make jah body a graveyard for de dead animals.

In the consciousness of eternity, time is not, neither is space. In man's consciousness there appears so much mercy, so much love, that these have been called time and space.

Man may be defined as the animal that can say ''I,'' that can be aware of himself as a separate entity.

Man lives in a world of meaning.

Every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition, has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food

One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.

That's when the realization comes. It swims up out of her subconscious in the same way that a nightmare does. Or when you leave the house and remember half an hour later that you left a teakettle going on the stove. It's a cold clammy reality that she can't do a damn thing about.

Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.

he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.

The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue—records that tell a consistent story.

Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.

Your ability to have empathy with the Geometer—to imagine what it would be like to be someone else—isn't a mere courtesy. It is an innate process of consciousness.

There is one universe, by the definition of universe. It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes—that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through a Hemn space shared by many other Narratives besides ours. Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it. The Geometers came from other Narratives—until they came here, and joined ours.

Our brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage. These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time. Translating what they perceive, moment to moment, into the shared language of geometry. That's what a brain is. That's what it is to be conscious.

But for the moment it was just a pattern of sensory impressions painted on the screen of her memory, not soaked in yet, not understood, not even granted the dignity of having really happened.

Well, it seems that this process you call consciousness is somewhat more complex than you perhaps gave it credit for at first," Orolo said. "One must be able to take in givens from sparse dustings of probability waves in a vacuum—" "I.e., see stuff." "Yes, and perform the trick of integrating those givens into seemingly persistent objects that can be held in consciousness.

What makes one Sumerian city better than another one? A bigger ziggurat? A better football team? Better me. What are me? Rules or principles that control the operation of society, like a code of laws, but on a more fundamental level. I don't get it. That is the point. Sumerian myths are not 'readable' or 'enjoyable' in the same sense that Greek and Hebrew myths are. They reflect a fundamentally different consciousness from ours.