Tom Stoppard Quotes

I'm very interested in theories in how we exist: how people exist and how souls exist separate from their bodies or their brains.

Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.

The mental never influences the physical. It is always the physical that modifies the mental, and when we think that the mind is diseased, it is always an illusion.

Every mental state is also physical.

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.

The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist, the only difference between a living and a dead body is that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent.

To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them.

I think the body is the ultimate thing. The soul and mind are part of the body. I don't think there is anything outside of that. Your physical self is who you are. Some people feel that that is reductionist, but I don't think it is. It's just true.

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

The body cannot be the soul.

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I dunno.

Self awareness is NOT just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.

Because the idea of zombies seems to make sense, and seems to, in a certain sense, be possible, I think one can use that to argue against the thesis that everything is purely physical. Now many people, I think, agree that the idea of zombies are conceivable, including people who want to be physicalists.

The only substance properly so called is the soul.

To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception.

For me, consciousness is non-local, not limited to the body, and can exist independent of it.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

Even the structure of the atom has been found by the mind. Therefore the mind is subtler than the atom. That which is behind the mind, namely the individual soul, is subtler than the mind.

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

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.

One class of philosophers calls every extraordinary appearance a judgment or a sign; another class views everything as the working of matter and motion. These two sets are at war with each other. The one denounces the other as superstitious or atheistical.