Quotes About Mind

Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary contains the following entry: Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

An event is a stretch of time, and time, according to physicists, is a continuous variable-an inexorable cosmic flow, in Newton's world, or a fourth dimension in a seamless hyperspace, in Einstein's. But the human mind carves this fabric into the discrete swatches we call events.

Humanism may seem bland and unexceptionable—who could be against human flourishing? But in fact it is a distinctive moral commitment, one that does not come naturally to the human mind.

The flexibility of the human mind - its ability to flip frames, shift gestalts, or reconstruct events – is a wondrous talent. But it makes it difficult to predict how person will think and talk about a given situation. When I hit a wall with the stick, am I affecting the stick by moving it to the wall, or affecting the wall using the stick as an instrument?

What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

This uncovered a number of basic features of our thought processes: that the mind deploys a set of rival frames that can construe even the most plodding everyday event in more than one way; that a frame for thinking about a change of location in real space can be metaphorically extended to conceptualize a change of state as motion in state-space; and that when the mind conceives of an entity as being somewhere or going somewhere, it tends to melt it down to a holistic blob.

our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.

Ä°nsanlar dil konusunda merakl? olmaktan öte tutkuludur. Sebebi belli: Dil zihnin en ula??labilir k?sm?d?r. Ä°nsanlar dil hakk?nda bilgi edinmek ister çünkü bu bilginin insan doÄŸas?n?n iç yüzünü anlamaya yol göstereceÄŸini bilirler.

hándicaps racionales

La gente es aceptada o rechazada en base a sus creencias, luego una función de la mente puede ser sostener creencias que procuren al que las sostiene el mayor número de aliados, protectores y discípulos, más que creencias que sean verdaderas.

Whether information and computation explain consciousness, in addition to knowledge, intelligence, and purpose, is a question I'll turn to in the final chapter.)

Religions have provided comfort, community, and moral guidance to countless people, and some biologists argue that a sophisticated deism, toward which many religions are evolving, can be made compatible with an evolutionary understanding of the mind and human nature.

No learning rule can be entirely devoid of theoretical content nor can the tabula ever be completely rasa." 13

Bertrand Russell wrote, "Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day." For intellectuals today, many of those convictions are about psychology and social relations. I will refer to those convictions as the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.

Moving" and "changing" are not enough grounds for the mind to construe an event in a particular way. It also cares about finer-grained concepts like forcing versus enabling a force, causing versus letting, and before-and-after versus at-the-same-time.

Steven Pinker

Self-deception is an exotic theory, because it makes the paradoxical claim that something called "the self" can be both deceiver and deceived.

A lot follows from the idea that the mind is a metaphor-monger.

Benjamin Franklin observed, "So convenient a thing is it to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to.

Where they differ is in the construal of those facts: how the intricate swirl of matter in space ought to be conceptualized by human minds.

It is a real puzzle for the science of mind why, when an unpleasant event befalls us—we slice our thumb along with the bagel, or knock a glass of beer into our lap—the topic of our conversation turns abruptly to sexuality, excretion, or religion.

Conceptual metaphors point to an obvious way in which people could learn to reason about knew, abstract concepts. They would notice, or have pointed out to them, a parallel between a physical realm they already understand and a conceptual realm that they don't yet understand. […] They would be the mechanism that the mind uses to understand otherwise inaccessible concepts.

The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything.

Tversky and Kahneman note that no one would buy probabilistic insurance, with premiums at a fraction of the cost but coverage only on certain days of the week, though they happily incur the same overall risk by insuring themselves against some hazards, like fires, but not others, like hurricanes.27 They buy insurance for peace of mind—to give themselves one less thing to worry about.