Erwin Schrodinger Quotes

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity.

All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.

How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

If I use the word consciousness, in our lab, in our institute, what we mean is the special quality of mind, the special features that exist in the mind, that permit us to know, for example, that we, ourselves, exist, and that things exist around us.

What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.

You believe that you live in the world, where in fact the world lives within you.

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.

There is the physical mind which is mechanical but the awareness which is the essential character (dharma) of the mind is also to some extent present there.

Do you even recognize your own consciousness?

This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived.

I remember the initial genesis quite clearly. My interest in dreams comes from this notion of realizing that when you dream you create the world that you are perceiving, and I thought that feedback loop was pretty amazing.

As you are, so is the world.

I am unable, when I turn to myself, to recognize any of my faculties or my capacities. The inner sensation which I have of myself informs me that I am, that I think, that I will, that I have sensory awareness, that I suffer, and so on; but it provides me with no knowledge whatever of what I am - of the nature of my thought, my sensations, my passions, or my pain - or the mutual relations that obtain between all these things ... I have no idea whatever of my soul.

Those who are awake all live in the same world. Those who are asleep live in their own worlds.

Life is consciousness.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.

Of all the thoughts that rise in the mind, the thought 'I' is the first thought.

You know, mind allows us to portray in different sensory modalities, visual, auditory, olfactory, you name it, what we are like and what the world is like. But this very, very important quality of subjectivity, this quality that allows us to take a distant view and say, "I am here, I exist, I have a life and there are things around me that refer to me." That me-ness, M-E-hyphen, that is what really constitutes consciousness.

My mind cannot know you, only labels, judgments, facts, and opinions about you. Being alone knows directly.

But can one not conceive of a presence, and of a presence to itself of the subject before speech or signs, a presence to itself of the subject in a silent and intuitive consciousness? Such a question therefore presupposes that, prior to the sign, and outside it, excluding any trace and any différance, something like consciousness is possible.