Quotes About Epiphenomenon

And there are, findable by me, four and only four theories in philosophy about the relationship of mind and matter: 1.Mind is an epiphenomenon of matter. 2.Matter is an epiphenomenon of mind. 3.Mind and matter are both equally real, but separate, and work in predetermined harmony with each other. 4.Mind and matter are human metaphors.

it may well be that the subject-object dichotomy is false to begin with and that consciousness is primary in the cosmos, not just an epiphenomenon of physical processes in a nervous system.

Consciousness is the true reality, and matter is an epiphenomenon bordering on trivial.

Moreover, it seems absurd that an epiphenomenon of matter can affect matter: If consciousness is an epiphenomenon, how can it collapse the spread-out wave of a quantum object to a localized particle when it takes a quantum measurement?

I've been interested in terrorism from the very beginning. My first novel is about that, too, and I think one reason I've been so interested in terrorism is because I have a deep interest - one of my deepest interests - in image culture and how it works. And terrorism is an epiphenomenon of image culture.

It is true that we take it as evident that social life depends upon its material foundation and bears its mark, just as the mental life of an individual depends upon his nervous system and in fact his whole organism. But collective consciousness is something more than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological basis, just as individual consciousness is something more than a simple efflorescence of the nervous system.

We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.

Reductionism deprives the human phenomenon of its very humanness, by making it a mere epiphenomenon, that is to say, by reducing a human phenomenon to intrinsically subhuman phenomena.

Indeed, it is the lack of discrimination between causes and conditions that allows reductionism to deduce a human phenomenon from, and reduce it to, a sub-human phenomenon. Indeed, reductionism may be called sub-humanism. However, by being derived from a sub-human phenomenon the human phenomenon is turned into a mere epiphenomenon.

The shadow of the Newtonian worldview is promulgated by those who wish, for whatever reason, to reinforce the view of a deterministic Universe with consciousness as a bizarre epiphenomenon.