Mind-Body Problem Quotes

There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.

There is a great difference between mind and body insomuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.

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 mind commands the body, and it obeys forthwith; the mind commands itself, and is resisted. The mind commands the hand to be moved, and such readiness is there that the command is scarce to be distinguished from the obedience. Yet the mind is mind, and the hand is body. The mind commands the mind to will, and yet, though it be itself, it obeyeth not. Whence this monstrous thing? and why is it?

Every day, I read books on philosophy and science fiction and human consciousness.

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?

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.

We can study various psychic functions and also the more primitive sensory functions, such as seeing, hearing, and so on, which constitute our image of our everyday world. They have a material side and the psychic side. And that is a gap which you cannot explain.

Andy Clark has several books you can find on Amazon, including 'Natural Born Cyborgs' and 'Being There.' I particularly recommend 'Being There' to anybody who still thinks the Cartesian separation of mind and body should be taken seriously.

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

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a view.

To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

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.

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.

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.

The Behaviorist cannot find consciousness in the test-tube of his science.

I think, therefore matter is capable of thinking.

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

We still know so little about how the brain interacts with the body chemistry or, for that matter, whether we should be talking about the brain or the mind, that it would be perilous to hazard any guess about the way Abraham Lincoln's biological health may or may not have affected him. Of course, we don't have Lincoln on hand to ask him directly; but even if we did, we still might not be able to make sense of how all the parts worked together.

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.

What's most interesting about trying to figure out AI is the questions that it forces you to ask about the nature of consciousness.

The question was a fashionable one, whether a definite line exists between psychological and physiological phenomena in human activity; and if so, where it lies?

The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbour a nonphysical mind.