Albert Hofmann Quotes

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

The body cannot be the soul.

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

I think, therefore matter is capable of thinking.

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.

Nature is thought immersed in matter. . .

I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion.

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

To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception.

People into hard sciences, neurophysiology, often ignore a core philosophical question: 'What is the relationship between our unique, inner experience of conscious awareness and material substance?' The answer is: We don't know, and some people are so terrified to say, 'I don't know.'

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

In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter.

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.

When man began to think he was a separate person with a separate soul, it created a violent situation.

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

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.

Internal and external nature, mind and matter, are in time and space, and are bound by the law of causation.

I think part of Western metaphysical dualism is, we're always being asked to choose one over the other.

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

The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.

...the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism: to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns.

...physics is the study of the structure of consciousness.

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