Philip K. Dick Quotes

The brain runs its show incognito.

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

The brain is a mystery; it has been and still will be. How does the brain produce thoughts? That is the central question and we have still no answer to it.

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.

The individual is the brain, not the heart.

It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ.

One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?

The last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like the other organs in the body...our emotions and higher callings, such as religion, as well as our grubby low-level physical systems like stereo vision and motor control, are products of a machine.

the brain, the mind, and all the things that happen inside it, it's a very erogenous zone.

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

The surgeon knows all the parts of the brain but he does not know his patient's dreams.

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.

It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time!

Funny thing, your brain, how it always functions on one level or another. How, even stuck in some sort of subconcious limbo, it works your lungs, your muscle twitches, your heart, in fact, in symphony with your heart, allowing it to feel love. Pain. Jealousy. Guilt. I wonder if it’s the same for people, lost in comas. Is there really such a thing

I can state with complete assurance that for each of us our brains form the material basis of our experiences and memories, our imaginations, our dreams.

Minds are simply what brains do.

Does the brain control you or are you controlling the brain? I don't know if I'm in charge of mine.

Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit.

Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.

One of the things that got me transitioning from physical science to brain science was asking, Why do we understand so much about the universe?

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.

When you understand how the mind-brain functions together, you know that faith, which is believing before seeing, is the natural process of creation.