Michio Kaku Quotes

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.

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 became really interested in the study of consciousness.

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.

If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

I worry that we don't have a very good definition of consciousness yet which makes it hard to tackle.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.

We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization.

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

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

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.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

There's certainly nothing original about the observation that conscious experience poses a hard problem.

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.

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

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

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

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

After all my probing into the human brain, I should still be aware of mysteries and come up with them myself.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a 'neural correlate of consciousness'?

In all the sciences except Psychology we deal with objects and their changes, and leave out of account as far as possible the mind which observes them.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

People into hard sciences, neurophysiology, often ignore a core philosophical question: 'What is the relationship between our unique, inner experience of conscious awareness and material substance?' The answer is: We don't know, and some people are so terrified to say, 'I don't know.'

The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.