consciousness

What if beauty was just our name for experiences that push us out of our mental ruts and burst open our reducing valves of consciousness?

Maybe consciousness is our way of condensing existence into a shareable form.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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