Sam Harris Quotes

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.

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.

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 great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

The mind is the effect, not the cause.

You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Whether consciousness is implanted in us by something divine, or whether it is created by the efforts of our brains, the end result is the same. We are.

Here is this three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity.

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

Does the brain control you or are you controlling the brain? I don't know if I'm in charge of mine.

Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes.

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

It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time!

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own

The mind aware of itself is a pilot... vastly freer than a passenger mind.

It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life.

Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

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

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

We know to much to command ourselves very far.

The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: If our genes are inherited, and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self delusion.