Albert Bandura Quotes

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

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

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.

Internal and external nature, mind and matter, are in time and space, and are bound by the law of causation.

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

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 habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.

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

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.

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

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

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.

Andy Clark has several books you can find on Amazon, including 'Natural Born Cyborgs' and 'Being There.' I particularly recommend 'Being There' to anybody who still thinks the Cartesian separation of mind and body should be taken seriously.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter.

The distinguishing characteristics of mind are of a subjective sort; we know them only from the contents of our own consciousness.

Descartes commanded the future from his study more than Napoleon from the throne.

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

Mind is the cause; everything else is effect.

The body cannot be the soul.

If we are to have magical bodies, we must have magical minds.

What disturbs people's minds are not events but their judgments on events.

Volumes are now written and spoken upon the effect of the mind upon the body. Much of it is true. But I wish a little more was thought of the effect of the body on the mind.

The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it...