Karl Schroeder Quotes

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

The distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy, a discrimination which is unquestionably based far more on the peculiarity of intellectual understanding than on the nature of things.

To separate mind from body doesn't make any sense.

There is a great difference between mind and body insomuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.

Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

Here, the broader issues are already familiar, and discussion has focused at a more sophisticated and detailed level. Within the philosophy of mind, the problem of consciousness is no big news.

I think that consciousness has always been the most important topic in the philosophy of mind, and one of the most important topics in cognitive science as a whole, but it had been surprisingly neglected in recent years.

Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

Perhaps people need to understand some history here. Rene Descartes, in the late 16th, early 17th century, postulated that body, mind, physicality and spirituality belonged to different realms of reality that didn't interact. On a positive side, it got the Inquisition off the backs of the intellectuals and they quit burning them at the stake for disagreeing with the Church.

The body cannot be the soul.

I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.

What's most interesting about trying to figure out AI is the questions that it forces you to ask about the nature of consciousness.

I think, therefore matter is capable of thinking.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

The Behaviorist cannot find consciousness in the test-tube of his science.

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

Dualistic doctrines that regard mind and body as separate entities do not provide much enlightenment on the nature of the disembodied mental state or on how an immaterial mind and bodily events act on each other

Metaphysical problems about "mind" versus "matter" arise only from epistemological confusions.

On the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am a thinking, non-extended thing; and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of body, in so far a this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing. And, accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and exist without it.

Age and illness made one a dualist