John Bradshaw Quotes

There seems to be no unexpressed self in animals, as if they are as fully themselves in flesh as possible, with no lag of consciousness to fill up, while we keep trying to grow into something else.

What right do we have to claim, as some might, that human beings are the only inhabitants of our planet blessed with an actual ability to be "aware"? The impression of a "conscious presence" is indeed very strong with me when I look at a dog or a cat or, especially, when an ape or monkey at the zoo looks at me. I do not ask that they are "self-aware" in any strong sense (though I would guess that an element of self-awareness can be present). All I ask is that they sometimes simply feel!

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.

If all consciousness is subject to essential laws in a manner similar to that in which spatial reality is subject to mathematical laws, then these essential laws will be of most fertile significance in investigating facts of the conscious life of human and brute animals.

The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.

A consciousness of history is one of the key factors that distinguishes us from other animals.

Every animal is related to its own constitution and the consciousness of it.

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

There's animals like us existing and thinking and giving interviews on Australian television.

The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.

If there is any characteristic that is distinctly human, it is the capability for reflective self-consciousness.

Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.

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

Once it has learned to dream the double, the self arrives at this weird crossroad and a moment comes when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self.

I think that we are supernatural. We are unique. We're the only animals in the universe that we know of that actually have self-consciousness, a sense of time and our own mortality.

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

We all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence, yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder.

What differentiates human from lower-animal consciousness is time. You can't explain the concept of "tomorrow" to your dog. Our consciousness is dominated by time - We're constantly running simulations of the future. Our brain is a prediction machine. The hallmark of intelligence, indeed of genius, is the number and complexity of the feedback loops we use in predicting the future.

In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.'

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

I desire therefore I exist.

Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?

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).

It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.