Philosophy Of Mind Quotes

In most sciences, there are few findings more prized than a counterintuitive result. It shows something surprising and forces us to reconsider our often tacit assumptions. In philosophy of mind, a counterintuitive “result” (e.g., a mind-boggling implication of somebody’s “theory” of perception, memory, consciousness, or whatever) is typically taken as tantamount to a refutation. This affection for one’s current intuitions, sometimes amounting (as we saw in the previous chapter) to a refusal even to consider alternative perspectives, installs deep conservatism in the methods of philosophers. Conservatism can be a good thing, but only if it is acknowledged. By all means, let’s not abandon perfectly good and familiar intuitions without a fight, but let’s recognize that the intuitions that are initially used to frame the issues may not live to settle the issues.

Daniel Dennett

And you thought there was only one exit door...

L.M. Fields

…if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes…

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this 'someone else' really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father's father... thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference - the difference between you and someone else - when objectively what is there is the same?

Erwin Schrödinger

There are a great number of ego defenses, and the combinations and circumstances in which we use them reflect on our personality. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum of its ego defenses, which are constantly shaping, upholding, protecting, and repairing it.The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home.

Neel Burton

…every feeling is the perception of a truth...

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The mind leans on [innate] principles every moment, but it does not come so easily to distinguish them and to represent them distinctly and separately, because that demands great attention to its acts, and the majority of people, little accustomed to think, has little of it.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledge…it would not be the source of necessary truths…

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

For the [innate] general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do not at all think of them.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

sometimes we don't need to think to beleive

Zakaria ABALI

The theories we find untrue, are those we cannot accept.

Jacques S Cantin

Those who succumb to pain find weakness in emotion and strength in reason.

Jacques S Cantin

Be gentle with othersFor many hurt though you see it notSome wounds are invisible yet deepKhoiSan Book of Wisdom

rassool jibraeel snyman

Inner peace comes from a clear conscience.

Eraldo Banovac

Spirituality is the ability to say - It is OK, in every circumstance.

Rajesh Nanoo

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which t hings as they are make sense, and that includes the physical world, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind.

Thomas Nagel

Readers of Darwin's life, for instance, and particularly of the published correspondence of Darwin, are henceforth naturalists in the making. Ever afterwards they are Darwins on a small scale, seeing animals and plants in an entirely different light and with a correspondingly keener interest.

John Steeksma

I do not want to sound cynical or condescending, but your lips are moving, your mind unbending.

Fakeer Ishavardas

This 'web of discourses' as Robyn called it...is as much a biological product as any of the other constructions to be found in the animal world. (Clothes too, are part of the extended phenotype of Homo Sapiens almost every niche inhabited by that species.An illustrated encyclopedia of zoology should no more picture Homo Sapiens naked than it should picture Ursus arctus-the black bear- wearing a clown suit and riding a bicycle.

Daniel C. Dennett

Once we have isolated the computational and neurological correlates of access-consciousness, there is nothing left to explain. It's just irrational to insist that sentience remains unexplained after all the manifestations of sentience have been accounted for, just because the computations don't have anything sentient in them. It's like insisting that wetness remains unexplained even after all the manifestations of wetness have been accounted for, because moving molecules aren't wet.

Steven Pinker

Although selfhood depends causally upon the existence of the brain, it amounts to something far more than the brain. This something is vague and intangible, and might best be described, I think, as a semi-fictional narrative that is in constant need of writing, editing, and preserving.

Neel Burton

Chaos is the law of nature, order is the dream of man...

Anonymous

Our entire neurobiology acts as a giant input-output system, that receives information from the outside world, processes that information and makes a person react accordingly.

Abhijit Naskar

Raise your children don't train them RjS

rassool jibraeel snyman

I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a. subjective side won't get us very far.

Niels Bohr

As researchers of the paranormal, we must understand there are ways to change the rhythm of time within us, ways to change the beat. These ways have been known since the beginnings of civilization, and possibly much earlier. And these ways would require no more effort than simply recognizing the secret rhythms of things. Moreover, we may learn to beat with them and begin to perceive a different kind of space, and ultimately discover an altogether different conception of reality…

Ojo Blacke

You cannot write your character until you know how he or she thinks, until you know what their philosophy is in the world that they occupy.

Don Roff

Philosophy may be blind without science, but science can lack vision without philosophy.

Scott O'Reilly

There is a gap between the mind and the world, and (as far as anybody knows) you need to posit internal representations if you are to have a hope of getting across it. Mind the gap. You’ll regret it if you don't.

Jerry A. Fodor

Unlike any other empirical object in Nature, the mind's presence is immediately apparent to itself, but opaque to all external observers.

George Makari

The order and connection of ideas in the same as the order and connection of things

Baruch Spinoza

The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body

Baruch Spinoza

It is much easier to concentrate the mind on external things, than to concentrate on the mind itself. For example, a Neuroscientist can be the smartest man (or woman) on earth in his understanding of the human mind. He may know all the neurochemical changes underlying an outrageous behavior of a person. But when he gets mad himself, very little of his own scientific intellect would actually come in handy for him to control his rage. The virtue of self-control is a skill, which requires practice, regardless of all the neurobiological expertise in the world.

Abhijit Naskar

Water and a bubble on it are one and the same. The bubble has its birth in the water, floats on it, and is ultimately resolved into it. Likewise, your consciousness is born in your brain, goes through various states in your lifetime and ultimately resolves into the brain.

Abhijit Naskar

There is nothing so special or boring nor there are any weak or strong things in this world. It is we and our surficial perception that creates these types of environment

Rajendra Ojha

You are modern humans of the civilized world. And modern humans rise beyond all laws and superstitions of the society. They help their fellow beings to rise from the ashes of ignorance, illusion and fear.

Abhijit Naskar

Art is the medicine for the soul.

Abhijit Naskar

The Game gives you a Purpose. The Real Game is, to Find a Purpose.

Vineet Raj Kapoor

Each stage of your lifeis like petals of a flower... unfolding and opening until it comes to full bloom...You will blossom and then you die...But know that this is not your ending.

Summerlyn Guthrie

There is within the human heart a quality of intelligence which has been known to surpass that attributed to the human mind.

Aberjhani

Scientific understanding of nature, doesn't make a person religious or atheist. It makes a person liberated of all labels. Moreover it makes a person kind and understanding.

Abhijit Naskar

Scientific understanding of nature, doesn't make a person religious or atheist. It makes a person liberated of all labels. Moreover it makes a person kind and understanding.

Abhijit Naskar

Any idea of separation is bondage. True liberation of the mind is in non-differentiation.

Abhijit Naskar

Any idea of separation is bondage. True liberation of the mind is in non-differentiation. And in the pursuit of breaking free from all the shackles of such man-made bondages, science is the most effective tool we have till this date. But in order to bring out all its effectiveness into the human society, it must be sweetened first with the touch of philosophy. Science without Philosophy leads to chaos. Philosophy without Science leads to nowhere. Only together they can construct a better world.

Abhijit Naskar

Every word that comes out of my neurons is to make humanity see that there are more things in our biology that make us one, than there are to set us apart. My goal is simple. It is to take the human civilization with me on the path of sweet general harmony.

Abhijit Naskar

Truth, by all means is the ultimate reward for all the sufferings of the human mind that often compel even the strongest of characters to get down on his or her knees.

Abhijit Naskar

Misery teaches you the value of joy. It reveals to you the gravitas of human life.

Abhijit Naskar

There is no religion better than love, no color better than the color of happiness and no language better than the language of compassion.

Abhijit Naskar

Quantum Mechanics can indeed be extremely complex to grasp, but when we talk about Consciousness, with decades of rigorous studies on the human brain we have realized that actually, there is no other phenomenon in the entire universe that is simpler than the majestic phenomenon of Consciousness.'If you think you have a solution to the problem of consciousness, you haven’t understood the problem.' This age-old metaphysical and philosophical argument is strictly not true. If you are sufficiently clear-sighted enough, you can realize the problem itself was a matter of the past when we didn’t have insight into the neurological basis of consciousness. And today it is common knowledge in Neuroscience that, all mesmerizing features of the Human Mind, including the glorious Human Consciousness, are born from the tiny specks of jelly inside your head.

Abhijit Naskar

Harmony doesn’t come merely through tolerance. You don’t need to tolerate people from other cultural backgrounds. It is time you start loving them. Toleration may make you a decent person, but it is love that makes you a true human being.

Abhijit Naskar

There are more things in our biology that make us one, than there are to set us apart.

Abhijit Naskar

One does not ask about one's true identity simply as a matter of course, but only in rather special circumstances. What this means, I believe, is that "who I really am" becomes an issue for me only when my system of values "breaks down," that is, only when I realize that the values according to which I have lived until now are insufficient to inform a life that I can recognize as satisfying. This realization can occur in variety of circumstances: when my beliefs about myself or the world undergo significant change; when I find that two of my values conflict in a fundamental way; or when, as in the present example, the relations among my previous commitments are insufficiently determinate to tell me what to do in the particular situation I face.

Frederick Neuhouser

It is an utter insult towards the fascinating neurons of your cerebral cortex, to believe anybody’s words blindly, even if that person is a Scientist or a Philosopher. So, I urge to you, that you must exercise your own reasoning and judgment (that’s what your cerebral cortex is for; to be specific the frontal lobes) at all times.

Abhijit Naskar

Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.

Baruch Spinoza

Knowledge planted in truth grows in truth.Strength born of peace loses nothing to hate.

Aberjhani

Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with myself. First I’ve agreed a principle withmyself, now I’m making out a case to myself, and debating my own feelings andintentions with myself. Who is this self, this phantom internal partner, with whom I’mentering into all these arrangements? (I ask myself.)

Michael Frayn

Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with myself. First I’ve agreed a principle with myself, now I’m making out a case to myself, and debating my own feelings and intentions with myself. Who is this self, this phantom internal partner, with whom I’m entering into all these arrangements? (I ask myself.)

Michael Frayn

Philosophy Of Mind Quotes

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