Vilayanur S. Ramachandran 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.

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.

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.

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.'

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

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

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

I've always had this fascination with the brain. I'm not really much of a religious person, but like anybody, you are at least fascinated by what some call a soul - what I would call the brain - and who we are and how we work.

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 more accurately we search into the human mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of his wisdom who made it.

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

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

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.

Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

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.

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.

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.

Einstein said, if everything exists as a substance of qualities, and qualities exist only in mind, then all is mind.

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

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

I love the human mind.