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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #consciousness
After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's... ↗
Which natural gift would you most like to possess? The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers). How would you like to die? Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around). What do you most dislike about your appearance? The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words. ↗
When General Genius built the first mentar [Artificial Intelligence] mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul. Or so the General genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus there didn't seem to be a need for a mentar body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mentar mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer. And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals. As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls. This was intelligence the mentars never inherited from us. ... The genius of the irrational... ... We gave them only rational functions -- the ability to think and feel, but no irrational functions... Have you ever been in a tight situation where you relied on your 'gut instinct'? This is the body's intelligence, not the mind's. Every living cell possesses it. The mentar substrate has no indomitable will to survive, but ours does. Likewise, mentars have no 'fire in the belly,' but we do. They don't experience pure avarice or greed or pride. They're not very curious, or playful, or proud. They lack a sense of wonder and spirit of adventure. They have little initiative. Granted, their cognition is miraculous, but their personalities are rather pedantic. But probably their chief shortcoming is the lack of intuition. Of all the irrational faculties, intuition in the most powerful. Some say intuition transcends space-time. Have you ever heard of a mentar having a lucky hunch? They can bring incredible amounts of cognitive and computational power to bear on a seemingly intractable problem, only to see a dumb human with a lucky hunch walk away with the prize every time. Then there's luck itself. Some people have it, most don't, and no mentar does. So this makes them want our bodies... Our bodies, ape bodies, dog bodies, jellyfish bodies. They've tried them all. Every cell knows some neat tricks or survival, but the problem with cellular knowledge is that it's not at all fungible; nor are our memories. We're pretty much trapped in our containers. ↗
In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being — a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say ‘Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,’ the ‘I’ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ‘I’ which does the pronouncing. The former ‘I’ is known to linguistic theory as the ‘subject of the enunciation’, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ‘I’, the one who speaks the sentence, is the ‘subject of the enunciating’, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two ‘I’s’ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The ‘subject of the enunciating’, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ‘I’ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot ‘mean’ and ‘be’ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ as: ‘I am not where I think, and I think where I am not. ↗
A positive needs a negative to complete its cycle, as the Moon needs an embodiment of itself, the Sun, to complete the cycle of its illusory essence, the Earth. Now if the earth is in dire straits, is bombing the moon to discover whether water is ‘perceived’ in the natural stance of humans an intelligent move? ↗
(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality") ↗
The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes. ↗
Sunny put on eyebrows, eyelashes, makeup, matching pajamas, a silk robe, and then say looking at herself in the vanity mirror in her bathroom. She had experienced moments in her life when she realized that she was actually alive and living in the world, instead of watching a movie starring herself, or narrating a book with herself as the main character. This was not one of those moments. She felt like she was drifting one centimeter above her physical self, a spirit at odds with its mechanical counterpart. She stood up carefully. Everything looked just right. ↗
