Rajneesh Quotes

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

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

I worry that we don't have a very good definition of consciousness yet which makes it hard to tackle.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.

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.

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.

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.

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

Here, the broader issues are already familiar, and discussion has focused at a more sophisticated and detailed level. Within the philosophy of mind, the problem of consciousness is no big news.

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.

For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.

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

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

Consciousness is the perception of what passes in man's own mind.

I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.

The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.

There is a great difference between mind and body insomuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.

What's most interesting about trying to figure out AI is the questions that it forces you to ask about the nature of consciousness.

What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.