David Chalmers Quotes

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer.

I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed.

With its billions of interconnected neurons, whose interactions change from millisecond to millisecond, the human brain is an archetypal complex system.

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.

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.

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 think that consciousness has always been the most important topic in the philosophy of mind, and one of the most important topics in cognitive science as a whole, but it had been surprisingly neglected in recent years.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions.

Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.

We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.

The thing you realize when you get into studying neuroscience, even a little bit, is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's as if the brain is trying to use everything at its disposal - what it is seeing, what it is hearing, what is the temperature, past experience.

We tend to think that when we're awake, we're on, and when we're sleeping our mind is off, but actually, we're not off. There's a lot going on!

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 is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

Minds are simply what brains do.

Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit.

Every morning we awaken from sleep and from our dreams and enter the state we call wakefulness. A continuous stream of thoughts, most of them repetitive, characterizes the normal wakeful state.

Sometimes people feel mind is merely the - in some animal, the energy or something from the brain. Now there are little sort of curiosities or I think doubt sometimes a sheer sort of mental attitude, some change in our brain. So these fields, now scientists are showing some interest.

I would be so curious to wire my brain up and see what's occurring when I act, because a performance is such a heightened state. I've always found that with doing theatre especially. It's so hard to come down.

Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neo-cortex, and the foundation of intelligence.

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.

We will move from looking at correlations between brain activity and behaviour to studying how the brain causes mental states and behaviour.