Thomas Nagel Quotes

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.

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

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.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

I worry that we don't have a very good definition of consciousness yet which makes it hard to tackle.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.

I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.

I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.

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

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.

Our mind is a machine, it is not a mystery. And the mind always wants to know the how, the why. And because of this persistent inquiry about how and why, it goes on missing all that is beyond the boundaries of machines. Life is beyond the boundaries of machines.

Here, the broader issues are already familiar, and discussion has focused at a more sophisticated and detailed level. Within the philosophy of mind, the problem of consciousness is no big news.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

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.'

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.

For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.

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

Might we... be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness - of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. - fit into such a computational picture?

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.

fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.

Nature is thought immersed in matter. . .

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.

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.