consciousness
an error that has been repeatedly committed in the quest for consciousness has been to treat it as a “special” function, even a separate “substance,” a fragrance wafting over the mind process but unconnected to it or to its underpinnings.
Antonio Damasio • Feeling & Knowing
Consciousness is a gathering of knowledge sufficient to generate, in the midst of flowing images, automatically, the notion that the images are mine, are happening in my living organism, and that the mind is…well, mine too! The secret of consciousness is gathering knowledge and exhibiting that knowledge as a certificate of identity for the mind. Co
... See moreAntonio Damasio • Feeling & Knowing
This liberalism relies upon the idea that consciousness is not a thing but an activity; that its elemental constituent is not some soul-like substance but the activity of understanding; that it knows itself and the world only imperfectly, through its reflections on the world and itself; that its freedom is a matter of degree and a function of its u
... See moreMatthew Stewart • An Emancipation of the Mind
For all its chilled-out associations, the attempt to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the present moment purely as a means to an end, in an effort to feel in control of your unfolding time. As usual, it doesn’t work. The self-consciousness you experience when you seek too effortfully to be “more in the moment” i... See more
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
there is an essential meaning of the word “consciousness,” one that contemporary neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, or philosophers can recognize, even though they approach the phenomenon with varied methods and explain it in different ways. For all of them, more often than not, “consciousness” is a synonym of mental experience. And what i
... See moreAntonio Damasio • Feeling & Knowing
Consciousness, according to Douglass, inhabits the frame of things; it finds itself only by stepping outside of itself and seeing itself in and through its encounter with the object. Douglass then states this theory concerning the inherently reflective nature of consciousness in language that is pure Feuerbach: "The process by which man is abl
... See moreMatthew Stewart • An Emancipation of the Mind
Maybe consciousness is our way of condensing existence into a shareable form.
Greg Jackson • The Dimensions of a Cave
Consciousness, for instance, isn’t for Kant some mysterious entity that needs to be explained; rather, it is nothing other than the necessary presumed unity that allows there to be a timeline against which I order and distinguish my perceptions.
William Egginton • The Rigor of Angels
We form new concepts without limit by stringing together what we already know or nesting one concept within another. In fact, some suggest that consciousness evolved precisely to allow for open-ended learning.