Lisa Joy Quotes

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason

I believe there is something going on in a conscious being, which includes many animals, as well as ourselves, that is not a computational activity. And to be conscious at all is not a quality that a computer as such will ever possess - no matter how complicated, no matter how well it plays chess or any of these things.

Obviously the idea of being human is a very human idea.

I am what I feel and think and do.

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?

Consciousness is observing your thoughts and actions so that you can live from true choice in the present moment rather than being run by programming from the past.

They who see through the eyes of others are controlled by the will of others.

Consciousness ... is the phenomenon whereby the universe's very existence is made known.

Literally, no man ever sees himself as others see him. No photograph or reflection ever gives us the same slant on ourselves that others see. It has often been proved on the witness stand that no two people ever see the same accident precisely the same way. We see through different eyes and from different angles. But if we could see things as other people see them, we could come closer to knowing why they do what they do and why they say what they say.

I am unable, when I turn to myself, to recognize any of my faculties or my capacities. The inner sensation which I have of myself informs me that I am, that I think, that I will, that I have sensory awareness, that I suffer, and so on; but it provides me with no knowledge whatever of what I am - of the nature of my thought, my sensations, my passions, or my pain - or the mutual relations that obtain between all these things ... I have no idea whatever of my soul.

Me, feeling. What a concept.

I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.

By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords." (p. 28)

Through our entire history we have become accustomed to pushing [animals] around in ways dictated by our own wants and needs without much regard for theirs.

Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence.

We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.

It's a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away.

My view is that consciousness, the seat of "personalness," is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. In other words, there is no scientific test one can postulate that would definitively prove its existence in another entity. We assume that other biological human persons, at least those who are at least acting conscious, are indeed conscious. But this too is an assumption, and this shared human consensus breaks down when we go beyond human experience (e.g., the debate on animal consciousness, and by extension animal rights).

Life is consciousness.

Every thing thinks, but according to its complexity. If this is so, then stones also think...and this stone thinks only I stone, I stone, I stone. But perhaps it cannot even say I. It thinks: Stone, stone, stone... God enjoys being All, as this stone enjoys being almost nothing, but since it knows no other way of being, it is pleased with its own way, eternally satisfied with itself.

A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening 'outside,' just by changing the contents of consciousness.

Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.

You know, mind allows us to portray in different sensory modalities, visual, auditory, olfactory, you name it, what we are like and what the world is like. But this very, very important quality of subjectivity, this quality that allows us to take a distant view and say, "I am here, I exist, I have a life and there are things around me that refer to me." That me-ness, M-E-hyphen, that is what really constitutes consciousness.

My mind cannot know you, only labels, judgments, facts, and opinions about you. Being alone knows directly.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.