Paul Bloom Quotes

Many philosophers say it's impossible to explain our conscious experience in scientific, biological terms at all. But that's not exactly true. Scientists have explained why we have certain experiences and not others. It's just that they haven't explained the special features of consciousness that philosophers care about.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

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.

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.

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.

Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.

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.

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

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

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.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

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.

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.

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

Within psychology and neuroscience, some new and rigorous experimental paradigms for studying consciousness have helped it begin to overcome the stigma that has been attached to the topic for most of this century.

Modern science tells us that the conscious self arises from a purely physical brain. We do not have immaterial souls.

People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years.

Some day... some day, I want to go much deeper into the human mind.

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?

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

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

I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.

Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.