Nicholas Humphrey > Quotes

“...moral and religious education, and especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed - even expected - to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong. Children, I'll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas - no matter who these other people are. parents, correspondingly, have no God-given license to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.
In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.”
― Nicholas Humphrey

“Television viewers, I was assured, expect to be told the truth in "science programmes". When I protested that in several areas I was not yet at all sure what the truth was, worse still that I was not sure that it mattered what the truth was so long as one way of looking at things made better sense than another, it left everybody confused.”
― Nicholas Humphrey, The Inner Eye

“Like so many other would-be students of the mind, I had gone to sea to see the world, only to discover that all I was seeing was sea. Not even that: I was down below decks, studying the engine room of mental life, with no clear sense of where the ship was steering.”
― Nicholas Humphrey, The Inner Eye

“You respond to sensory stimulation with the makings of an action— never completed—appropriate to what's happening and how you feel about it. And then you read your own response so as to get a mental picture of it.”
― Nicholas Humphrey, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness

“The peacock’s gaudy tail does not enable him to fly any higher, but it raises his status in the eyes of the peahen.”
― Nicholas Humphrey

“Broad's classic work of philosophy was a tome called The Mind and Its Place in Nature.12 In it, he argued that the mind is partly material and partly psychic. He was impressed by the evidence gathered by the Society for Psychical Research for the persistence of the human mind after death. What he found particularly con-vincing were spiritualist seances where a dead person, contacted by a medium, proved able to disclose information presumably unknown to anyone else. Yet, careful thinker that he was, he had a major reservation. He couldn't but remark that most messages from the dead were decidedly off-key, as if after death the mind becomes degraded morally and intellectually.”
― Nicholas Humphrey, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness