Thomas Nagel Quotes

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

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.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

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

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

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.

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.

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

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.

For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.

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

Studying consciousness tells us more about how the world is fundamentally strange. I think we have a few revolutions to go yet before we get to the bottom of it.

Might we... be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness - of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. - fit into such a computational picture?

Could it ever be explained, how matter becomes conscious?

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

I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.

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.

fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.

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

The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.

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

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

There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain.

Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject.