C. S. Lewis Quotes

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.

MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

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.

Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical.

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

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 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.

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

The brain runs its show incognito.

The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling.

They do not think, therefore they are not.

Minds are simply what brains do.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

I'm your mind", it claims. "You can't parse ME into dendrites and synapses

You talk of our having an idea; we do not have an idea. The idea has us, and martyrs us, and scourges us, and drives us into the arena to fight and die for it, whether we want to or not.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think. Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.

The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.

The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbour a nonphysical mind.

I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the psychological. From the moment an organism takes account of a previous experience and adapts to a new situation, that very much resembles psychology.

I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.

If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.

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