Mental Representation Quotes

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

What we think about Paris is a part of how we feel about it. Our idea of Paris is our idea and we don't know that that's not necessarily the way it really is. It feels so real.

Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.

So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task.

I rarely think in words at all.

All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.

Some scholars argue that although the brain might contain neural subsystems, or modules, specialized for tasks like recognizing faces and understanding language, it also contains a part that constitutes a person, a self: the chief executive of all the subsystems.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

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.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

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.

Consciousness, much like our feelings, is based on a representation of the body and how it changes when reacting to certain stimuli. Self-image would be unthinkable without this representation.

Reality manifests itself as constant and objective - independent of us, but as changeable in space and time. Consequently, its reflection in us contains both properties. Mixed up in our mind, these properties are confused and we do not have a proper image of reality.

The appearance of things to the mind is the standard of every action to man.

The best Paris I know now is in my head.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

Thought is not merely expressed in words, it comes into existence through them

I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.

But thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them.

I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.