Quotes About Awareness

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.

The businessman turns out to have a lot of zanshin. Translating this concept into English is like translating "fuckface" into Nipponese, but it might translate into "emotional intensity" in football lingo.

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.

Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one will want to commit genocide in the future.

It's like, if you—people of a certain age—would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures.

Sergeant Major," Arjun said quietly, "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Yur snorted. "Is that a fancy way of saying it's above my pay grade, sir?

It is what you don't expect," he'd said, "that most needs looking for.

You spend too much time goggled in," she says. "Try a little Reality, man.

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 are you doing?" Dengo would ask him. "Observing," father would say. "But how long can you observe the same thing?" "Forever.

Oh come on, you did it yourself when you saw the billboard at the airport. 'Ugh! Blue hair! How tasteless!' When you did that, you identified, you categorized that character as belonging to the Other. And once you have done that, attacking it, murdering it, becomes easier. Perhaps even an urgent need.

You could get used to anything. You got used to it and then time raced by, and before you knew it, time was up

It is just that — according to some who style themselves in the know — you are destitute.

The constant dangers of sudden electrocution from above or drowning in liquid shit below keep him looking up and down as well as side-to-side.

The ability of our consciousness to see—not just as a speelycaptor sees (by taking in and recording givens) but identifying things—copper bowls, melodies, faces, beauty, ideas—and making these things available to cognition—that ability, Atamant said, is the ultimate basis of all rational thought.

She's in shock. Keep her head low and her legs high

Consciousness, he wrote, is non-spatiotemporal in nature. But it becomes involved with the spatiotemporal world when conscious beings react to their own cognitions and make efforts to communicate with other conscious beings—something that they can only do by involving their spatiotemporal bodies.

It is what you don't expect," he'd said, "that most needs looking for." "Do

World class cereal eating is a dance of fine compromises.

Then he got a look on his face as if he were thinking. Daniel had learned, in his almost seventy years, not to expect much of people who got such looks, because thinking really was something one ought to do all the time.

If you posture defiantly, it tells me that you have not learned the skill of recognizing when you are running awry, and correcting yourself. And you must leave my house in that case, for such people only go further and further astray until they find destruction. But if you take this opportunity to consider where you have gone wrong, and to adjust your course, it tells me that you shall do well enough in the end.

They can't tell what she's thinking. But they can tell that something's going on in her brain, that she's using parts of her brain right now that she didn't use when they were asking the nonsense questions.

A great warrior must always search for the enemy's intentions and guard his own.

Consciousness—the here-and-now of the human mind—is linked to the body's surroundings by a thousand strands, most of which we're never aware of until all of them are severed.