Bernard Beckett Quotes

Do you even recognize your own consciousness?

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

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

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.

Consciousness is the foundation of all thinking; and thinking is the foundation of all consciousness.

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

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.

Thinking... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas

What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

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

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and considered by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.

To think is not always to see.

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.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.

Life is but thought.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?