Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes

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

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

The body cannot be the soul.

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

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.

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

Nature is thought immersed in matter. . .

Metaphysical problems about "mind" versus "matter" arise only from epistemological confusions.

We exist solely because we have a body and a mind ? a mind that arises out of the body. If this were true, we would cease to exist after our body was gone.

Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.

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 human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

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.

I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

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.

Perhaps people need to understand some history here. Rene Descartes, in the late 16th, early 17th century, postulated that body, mind, physicality and spirituality belonged to different realms of reality that didn't interact. On a positive side, it got the Inquisition off the backs of the intellectuals and they quit burning them at the stake for disagreeing with the Church.

In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.

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

The mental never influences the physical. It is always the physical that modifies the mental, and when we think that the mind is diseased, it is always an illusion.

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

I think, therefore matter is capable of thinking.

Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.