Thomas Jefferson Quotes

People into hard sciences, neurophysiology, often ignore a core philosophical question: 'What is the relationship between our unique, inner experience of conscious awareness and material substance?' The answer is: We don't know, and some people are so terrified to say, 'I don't know.'

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.

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

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.

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

...physics is the study of the structure of consciousness.

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.

Modern secular thought has its own dualism: It treats only the physical world as knowable and testable, while locking everything else - mind, spirit, morality, meaning - into the realm of private, subjective feelings. The so-called fact/value split.

The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.

I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.

It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.

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

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

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.

If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible.

Nature is thought immersed in matter. . .

Solipsism may be logically consistent with present Quantum Mechanics, Monism in the sense of Materialism is not.

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule.

Human beings are not capable of creating a thought that truly conceives of this existence. Nobody knows if we are really here, alive, or anything. It's a mystery.

I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

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

One way of saying that is that there is an objective reality beyond our mind. A way to think of this in a philosophic sense is to look between the two great extremes: the idealist philosophy that says mind and consciousness is the only thing and that matter is simply an illusion, or a Maya, the product of mind; and the other extreme, a strict materialist determinism, which says that mind and consciousness is a secondary phenomenon of the collision of matter.

Of course I'm a fake. We're all fakes on this whole world, pretending to be something we're not. We are not just bodies walking around, not just atoms, molecules. We are unkillable, undestroyable ideas of the IS, no matter how much we believe otherwise.

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.