Nikola Tesla Quotes

The most consistent versions of materialism deny the reality of anything beyond matter - no soul, no spirit, no will, no mind. This is called reductionism: Humans are reduced to biochemical machines.

Materialist philosophies that treat human beings as machines or animals possess the high ground in our culture - academia, the most powerful media and many of our courts.

Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment.

A cold atheistical materialism is the tendency of the so-called material philosophy of the present day.

Anything that's living is a machine. I'm a machine; my children are machines. I can step back and see them as being a bag of skin full of biomolecules that are interacting according to some laws.

If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar.

The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.

The human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.

It's a no-win argument - that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.

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.

To believe that mind is all, that thought is all is only a higher materialism.

A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.

Everyone in Life does Exactly what they Know How to Do Given the Conditions of their Lives

If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects.

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.

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.

What we know oman today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him as a machine.

I have shown that those who deplore Artificial Intelligence are also those who deplore the evolutionary accounts of human mentality: if human minds are non-miraculous products of evolution, then they are, in the requisite sense, artifacts, and all their powers must have an ultimately mechanical explanation. We are descended from macros and made of macros, and nothing we can do is beyond the power of huge assemblies of macros.

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

Suppose you had inherited the same body and temperament and mind that Al Capone had. Suppose you had had his environment and experiences. You would then be precisely what he was. . . . For it is those things - and only those things - that made him what he was. . . . You deserve very little credit for being what you are - and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.

Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.

A person is either the effect of his environment or is able to have an effect upon his environment.

Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics.... The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered in the same plane.