Quotes About Awareness

We all come into the story half way through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends.

Brain's got all kinds of gauges. You can know you're blind even when you're not; you can know you can see, even when you're blind. And yeah, you can know you don't exist even when you do. It's a long list, commissar. Cotard's, Anton's, Damascus disease. Just for starters.

NOT UNTIL WE ARE LOST DO WE BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND OURSELVES. —Henry David Thoreau

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

This is it. The final conscious experience. Enjoy it while it lasts.

We're not thinking machines, we're—we're feeling machines that happen to think.

TO HIMSELF EVERYONE IS IMMORTAL; HE MAY KNOW THAT HE IS GOING TO DIE, BUT HE CAN NEVER KNOW THAT HE IS DEAD. —

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half asses way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on try. We focus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back

Sometimes when you see too much, you miss a lot.

And she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from the nearest sunlight, that it's only dark when the lights are on.

So much more aware, so much less perceptive. An automaton could do better.

Long before art and science and philosophy arose, consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition.

Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding.

Not blind chance. Blindsight. Amanda? Respond, please." "Blindsight?" "Nothing wrong with the receptors," he said distractedly. "Brain processes the image but it can't access it. Brain stem takes over." "Your brain stem can see but you can't?

If there's one thing I'm the world's greatest expert on, it's how it feels to be me. And

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies.

Nie jesteÅ›my myÅ›lÄ…cymi maszynami, jesteÅ›my czujÄ…cymi maszynami, które przypadkiem myÅ›lÄ….

Comforting lies get far too easy with practice.

Semmelweis reflex. They

REALITY IS THAT WHICH, WHEN YOU STOP BELIEVING IN IT, DOESN'T GO AWAY. —PHILIP K. DICK

The gut was not a long-range organ. Its grasp of culpability degraded exponentially with distance; there

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

Being awake and aware does not automatically change a situation, but enforcing the systems and strategies that will ameliorate the situation is your key to liberation.