Raymond Smullyan 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.'

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.

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

Nature is thought immersed in matter. . .

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.

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.

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

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

I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion.

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.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

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

The body cannot be the soul.

The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.

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

Metaphysics, in whatever latitude the term be taken, is a science, or complement of sciences, exclusively occupied with mind.

Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical.

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

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

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.

We are assuming that we exist, that there is reality, and that the matter of which we are made is real.

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.