Consciousness

"Life is not determined by Consciousness, but Consciousness by life."

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

"[T]o emotionally experience pain, we must be cognitively aware of the stimulus (a cortical process), and this in turn requires that we must be conscious. The key question then is not about the anatomic completion or functionality of nociceptive pathways in utero, but whether the fetus is ever conscious and thus aware."

"The crowning intellectual accomplishment of the brain is the real world. Physicists and chemists long ago demonstrated that the real world of our experience is very different from the inanimate universe of physics and chemistry. The sounds and colors we perceive, the apparent objects that integrate them, the space in which those objects are located, the values we attach to them, the intentions we attribute to others -all these fundamental aspects of the real world of our experience are adaptive interpretations of the really real world of physical science."

"Some form of self-awareness is surely essential to highly intelligent thought... On the other hand, I doubt that any part of a mind can see very deeply into other parts; it can only use models it constructs of them."

"Consciousness is a suitcase-like word that we use to refer to many different mental activities, which don't have a single cause or origin—and, surely, that is why people have found it so hard to "understand what consciousness is." …this produced a problem that will remain unsolvable until we find ways to chop it up. ...we can replace that single, big problem by many smaller, more solvable ones."

"Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know."

"B. F. Skinner actually put forward – and this is a measure of scientific desperation over consciousness – the idea that consciousness was a weird vibrational by-product of the vocal cords. That we did not actually think. We thought we thought because of this weird vibration caused by the vocal cords. This shows the lengths that hard science will go to to banish the ghost from the machine."

"The primary aim, object, and purpose of consciousness is control. Consciousness in a mere automaton is a useless and unnecessary epiphenomenon."

"All our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text."

"The last leap to the cortex is crucial, because this wrinkly top layer of the brain is believed to be the organ of consciousness, the generator of awareness of ourselves and things not ourselves (like a surgeon’s knife). Before nerve fibers extending from the thalamus have penetrated the cortex — connections that are not made until the beginning of the third trimester — there can be no consciousness and therefore no experience of pain."

"The youngsters, ages 1 to 5, are shown smiling, laughing, fussing, crying; they appear alert and aware of what is going on around them. Yet each of these children was born essentially without a cerebral cortex. The condition is called hydranencephaly, in which the brain stem is preserved but the upper hemispheres are largely missing and replaced by fluid. Merker (who has held positions at universities in Sweden and the United States but is currently unaffiliated) became interested in these children as the living embodiment of a scientific puzzle: where consciousness originates. He joined an online self-help group for the parents of children with hydranencephaly and read through thousands of e-mail messages, saving many that described incidents in which the children seemed to demonstrate awareness. In October 2004, he accompanied the five on the trip to Disney World, part of an annual get-together for families affected by the condition. Merker included his observations of these children in an article, published last year in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, proposing that the brain stem is capable of supporting a preliminary kind of awareness on its own. “The tacit consensus concerning the cerebral cortex as the ‘organ of consciousness,’” Merker wrote, may “have been reached prematurely, and may in fact be seriously in error.” Merker’s much-discussed article was accompanied by more than two dozen commentaries by prominent researchers. Many noted that if Merker is correct, it could alter our understanding of how normal brains work and could change our treatment of those who are now believed to be insensible to pain because of an absent or damaged cortex. For example, the decision to end the life of a patient in a persistent vegetative state might be carried out with a fast-acting drug, suggested Marshall Devor, a biologist at the Center for Research on Pain at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Devor wrote that such a course would be more humane than the weeks of potentially painful starvation that follows the disconnection of a feeding tube (though as a form of active euthanasia it would be illegal in the United States and most other countries). The possibility of consciousness without a cortex may also influence our opinion of what a fetus can feel. Like the subplate zone, the brain stem is active in the fetus far earlier than the cerebral cortex is, and if it can support consciousness, it can support the experience of pain. While Mark Rosen is skeptical, Anand praises Merker’s work as a “missing link” that could complete the case for fetal pain. But anatomy is not the whole story. In the fetus, especially, we can’t deduce the presence or absence of consciousness from its anatomical development alone; we must also consider the peculiar environment in which fetuses live."

"IN FACT, “THERE may not be a single moment when consciousness, or the potential to experience pain, is turned on,” Nicholas Fisk wrote with Vivette Glover, a colleague at Imperial College, in a volume on early pain edited by Anand. “It may come on gradually, like a dimmer switch.” It appears that this slow dawning begins in the womb and continues even after birth. So where do we draw the line? When does a release of stress hormones turn into a grimace of genuine pain?"

"The most that the extra-neural environment can ever do is partially select which of a finite menu of mind/brain/virtual world states is instantiated at a given moment. Subjects can never, directly, do more than apprehend their own mind/brain/virtual-world states. The values they appear to find in the mind-independent world are instead intrinsic features of particular states of their own brains."

"In retrospect, today's entire dreaming and waking consciousness may prove to be only minor variants on a theme whose motif can't be grasped from within."

"We couldn’t be representing objects unless, in all cases of such representing, we could also become conscious of our representing. ... All consciousness ... is a species of self-consciousness, representing objects is at the same time attending to the mind’s activities. … Although the object of my intending is some state of affairs or other, I am also potentially aware as I intend that what I am doing is an act of remembering, thinking, or imagining. My asserting that S is P is not an assertion of mine unless I am implicitly aware as I assert that I am asserting, not entertaining the possibility that, S is P."

"Life-force vitalists are rare today, but they have been replaced by those who believe that human consciousness has some special property that goes beyond the laws of physics. Such neovitalists, searching for the roots of consciousness beyond material reality, might be in for another disappointment."

"You who are sitting before me have the power to change my consciousness into painting, poem, melody or anything else."

"In reviewing the neuroanatomical and physiological evidence in the fetus, it was apparent that connections from the periphery to the cortex are not intact before 24 weeks of gestation and, as most neuroscientists believe that the cortex is necessary for pain perception, it can be concluded that the fetus cannot experience pain in any sense prior to this gestation. After 24 weeks there is continuing development and elaboration of intracortical networks such that noxious stimuli in newborn preterm infants produce cortical responses. Such connections to the cortex are necessary for pain experience but not sufficient, as experience of external stimuli requires consciousness."

"Consciousness does not begin until after 20 weeks’ gestation. 12 13 Thus we do not begin to exist as persons, as morally relevant entities, until at least 20 weeks of fetal gestation. The question of when and if killing occurs does not even arise until at least 20 weeks’ gestation. On this account, killing a fetus before 20 weeks is not killing a person, it is preventing a person coming into existence."

"Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."

"Consciousness, the level of perception, was the first split introduced into the mind after the separation, making the mind a perceiver rather than a creator. Consciousness is correctly identified as the domain of the ego. The ego is a wrong-minded attempt to perceive yourself as you wish to be, rather than as you are. Yet you can know yourself only as you are, because that is all you can be sure of. Everything else is open to question. p. 16"

"Sleep is no more a form of death than death is a form of unconsciousness. Complete unconsciousness is impossible. You can rest in peace only because you are awake. p. 56"

"I have only one real message in this lecture, and that is: consciousness is a biological phenomenon, like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis—you know all the biological phenomena—and once you accept that, most, if not all of the hard problems about consciousness simply evaporate."

"It is not worth asking how to define consciousness, how to explain it, how it evolved, what its function is, etc., because there's no one thing for which all the answers would be the same. Instead, we have many sub-capabilities, for which the answers are different: e.g., different kinds of perception, learning, knowledge, attention control, self-monitoring, self-control, etc."

"... the having is the knowing: Having conscious experience is knowing what it is. You don’t have to think about it (it’s really much better not to). You just have to have it. It’s true that people can make all sorts of mistakes about what is going on when they have experience, but none of them threaten the fundamental sense in which we know exactly what experience is just in having it."

"Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild."

"Neocortical functions are those “higher brain” processes of the cerebral cortex necessary for active consciousness and volition. This should be contrasted with whole-brain functioning, which includes activities of the brainstem as well as the cortex."

"The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life's challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dream of ordinary unconsciousness then turns into a nightmare. If you cannot be present even in normal circumstances, such as when you are sitting alone in a room, walking in the woods, or listening to someone, then you certainly won't be able to stay conscious when something "goes wrong" or you are faced with difficult people or situations, with loss or the threat of loss. You will be taken over by a reaction, which ultimately is always some form of fear, and pulled into deep unconsciousness. Those challenges are your tests."

"Only people who are in a deeply negative state [of consciousness], who feel very bad indeed, would create such a reality as a reflection of how they feel. Now they are engaged in destroying nature and the planet that sustains them. Unbelievable but true. Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species. That's not a judgment. Its a fact. It is also a fact that the sanity is there underneath the madness. Healing and redemption are available right now."

"See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always non-acceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness."

"Historically, psychologists have neither addressed nor evaded consciousness successfully, and two major psychological metatheories, introspectionism and behaviorism, have come to grief on the horns of this dilemma. Having perhaps gained some wisdom from these failures, most scientific psychologists now subscribe to a third metatheory for psychology, the cognitive approach."

"Neurologists who routinely evaluate patients with head injuries define consciousness in terms of waking EEG, the ability to answer questions, report perceptual events, show alertness to sudden changes in the environment, exercise normal voluntary control over speech and action, use memory, and maintain orientation to time, place, and self. ...Physicians make life-or-death decision on the basis of these observable events, and in practice this works very well. Very similar criteria are used in psychological and brain research. Thus medicine and science seem to agree with traditional philosophy that consciousness and subjectivity can be identified in practical ways. ...The empathy criterion is far more demanding."

"Consciousness is always accompanied by subjectivity."

"Evolution, as we understand it, and as it must be studied by the human intellect, is the story of the evolution of consciousness, and not the story of the evolution of the form. This latter evolution is implicit in the other, and of secondary importance from the occult angle."

"Let me assure you that under the pressure of modern life, under the strain of the imposed present conditions and civilisation, plus the mental concern, the terror of marching armies, the thunder of the many voices, and the stress of world wide economic stringency, the human consciousness is rapidly awakening from its long sleep. That great and fundamental reality, which we call the "human state of mind", is just beginning to focus itself upon the things which matter, and to express itself in a living fashion."

"When we recognise the fact that the average man is as yet fully conscious only on the physical plane, nearly conscious on the emotional plane, and only developing the consciousness of the mental plane, it is obvious that his comprehension of cosmic data can be but rudimentary."

"The development of the human being is but the passing from one state of consciousness to another. It is a succession of expansions, a growth of that faculty of awareness that constitutes the predominant characteristic of the indwelling Thinker. It is the progressing from consciousness polarised in the higher self, ego, or soul, thence to a polarisation in the Monad, or Spirit, till the consciousness eventually is Divine."

"These realizations, or apprehended expansions of consciousness, are under natural law, and come in due course of time to every soul without exception."

"To render these ideas clearer to the general reader, let him set out with the postulate that there is one absolute Reality which antecedes all manifested, conditioned, being. This Infinite and Eternal Cause — dimly formulated in the “Unconscious” and “Unknowable ” of current European philosophy — is the rootless root of “all that was, is, or ever shall be.” It is of course devoid of all attributes and is essentially without any relation to manifested, finite Being. It is “Be-ness ” rather than Being (in Sanskrit, Sat), and is beyond all thought or speculation. This “Be-ness” is symbolised in the Secret Doctrine under two aspects. On the one hand, absolute abstract Space, representing bare subjectivity, the one thing which no human mind can either exclude from any conception, or conceive of by itself. On the other, absolute Abstract Motion representing Unconditioned Consciousness. Even our Western thinkers have shown that Consciousness is inconceivable to us apart from change, and motion best symbolises change, its essential characteristic. This latter aspect of the one Reality, is also symbolised by the term “The Great Breath,” a symbol sufficiently graphic to need no further elucidation. Thus, then, the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine is this metaphysical One Absolute — Be-ness — symbolised by finite intelligence as the theological Trinity."

"Parabrahm (the One Reality, the Absolute) is the field of Absolute Consciousness, i.e., that Essence which is out of all relation to conditioned existence, and of which conscious existence is a conditioned symbol. But once that we pass in thought from this (to us) Absolute Negation, duality supervenes in the contrast of Spirit (or consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object. Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as independent realities, but as the two facets or aspects of the Absolute (Parabrahm), which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective. Considering this metaphysical triad as the Root from which proceeds all manifestation, the great Breath assumes the character of precosmic Ideation. p. 15"

"Apart from Cosmic Substance, Cosmic Ideation could not manifest as individual consciousness, since it is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as “I am I,” a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity. Again, apart from Cosmic Ideation, Cosmic Substance would remain an empty abstraction, and no emergence of consciousness could ensue. The “Manifested Universe,” therefore, is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of its existence as “manifestation.” p.15"

"What we really mean by free will... is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. ...the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine."

"Our consciousness depends wholly on our seeing the outside world in... categories. And the problems of consciousness arise from putting reconstitution beside internalization, from our being able to see ourselves as if we were objects in the outside world. That is the very nature of language; it is impossible to have a symbolic system without it. [Difficulties] arise from this remarkable and wholly human gift that allows us first of all to separate ourselves from the outside world. ...[W]e are able to rearrange it in our heads ...And with that goes inevitably a sense of ourselves, sometimes also as an outside person. The Cartesian dualism between mind and body arises directly from this, and so do all the famous paradoxes, both in mathematics and in linguistics..."

"Consciousness... is our mode of analysis of the outside world into objects and actions. ...it at once posed a problem... that we also think of ourselves as objects and we therefore also apply language to ourselves. We treat ourselves both as objects of language and as speakers of language, both as objects of the symbolism and as symbols of it. And all of the difficult paradoxes which go right back to the Greek times and reappear in modern mathematics depend essentially on this."

"The emergence of consciousness, like the unfolding of a leaf, relies upon restraint. Richness, the richness of the perceived world and the richness of the imagined worlds of literature and art—the human spirit—is the consequence of controlled, not precipitate, collapse."