Vanna Bonta Quotes

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

In my definition of consciousness, consciousness is the same thing as life. What wisdom traditions also call spirit.

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.

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.

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.

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.

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.

What does it mean to be human, and what is at the human heart, and is there a soul, or is that all there is? Can an artificial being be intelligent? Is 'intelligent' the definition of humanity, or is it something deeper?

I am Walter, a body, but more important than the body is my spirit.

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

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

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.

They do not think, therefore they are not.

My view is that consciousness, the seat of "personalness," is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. In other words, there is no scientific test one can postulate that would definitively prove its existence in another entity. We assume that other biological human persons, at least those who are at least acting conscious, are indeed conscious. But this too is an assumption, and this shared human consensus breaks down when we go beyond human experience (e.g., the debate on animal consciousness, and by extension animal rights).

I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.

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.

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

Our mind is a machine, it is not a mystery. And the mind always wants to know the how, the why. And because of this persistent inquiry about how and why, it goes on missing all that is beyond the boundaries of machines. Life is beyond the boundaries of machines.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

All thinking, knowing, perception, space-time, occur in consciousness. You are a non-local consciousness. The world is in you.