Michael Shermer Quotes

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

The brain, is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.

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.

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.

Consciousness, for me, is a manifestation of complexity in biology. It's an emergent property.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind.

As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.

I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me".

Simple molecules combine to make powerful chemicals. Simple cells combine to make powerful life-forms. Simple electronics combine to make powerful computers. Logically, all things are created by a combination of simpler, less capable components. Therefore, a supreme being must be in our future, not our origin. What if "God" is the consciousness that will be created when enough of us are connected by the Internet?!!

I read a couple of books about neuroscience and the relationship between the mind and the body.

The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.

After all my probing into the human brain, I should still be aware of mysteries and come up with them myself.

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.

No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious.

If the process of life is about moving toward increased complexity and organization, a sort of sublime unfolding of greater and greater self-organizing systems, then we're actually doing pretty well.

There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.

The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.

I'm interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence - that it's possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions - is fascinating.

Studying consciousness tells us more about how the world is fundamentally strange. I think we have a few revolutions to go yet before we get to the bottom of it.

More-radical scholars insist that an inherent clash exists between science and our long-held conceptions about consciousness and moral agency: if you accept that our brains are a myriad of smaller components, you must reject such notions as character, praise, blame, and free will.

It was quite difficult to find a place to do what we wanted, namely to study the neurological basis of behaviour and especially learning and memory, which we were particularly interested in.