Andrew H. Thomas > Quotes

“Aristotle was no experimenter, and he relied too much on his preconceptions. Famously, Aristotle once proclaimed that women have fewer teeth than men. Because no one thought to check this proclamation of Aristotle, for a thousand years everyone believed that women have fewer teeth (women and men, of course, actually have the same number of teeth).”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 3: The secret of time

“any unifying idea has to be simple.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight: The simple link between relativity and quantum mechanics

“As our bodies grow old and maybe painful, our minds can stay young, apparently impervious to the ravages of time. I have often heard an old person say that they feel the same in their mind as they did when they were young — I feel the same way myself (though I do not yet consider myself old). It is as if the physical world cannot affect our mind.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness

“However, to detect the presence of consciousness would not only require you to detect that something was being computed, but it would also require you to consider what was being computed. You would have to examine the system in great detail to make sure it possessed structured "thoughts", and had a rational stream of consciousness.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 11: The Logic of Consciousness

“if you want to do anything useful with information, you have to use logic.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 11: The Logic of Consciousness

“consciousness appears to be an emergent effect which only emerges in very particular circumstances.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 11: The Logic of Consciousness

“static information does not lead to consciousness, no matter how that information is arranged in the brain. Organization of information is not sufficient to produce consciousness — there has to be time-based processing of information for consciousness to emerge.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 11: The Logic of Consciousness

“In the more general sense, "computation" involves logical information processing, performing a series of logical steps to achieve some useful goal, such as solving some problem, or performing a calculation.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 11: The Logic of Consciousness

“in a logical syllogism, we always start with a number of terms and premises.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 11: The Logic of Consciousness

“if our conscious mind is to do anything useful, or achieve any goal, it has to perform logical information processing.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 11: The Logic of Consciousness

“there has to be time-based processing of information for consciousness to emerge.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 11: The Logic of Consciousness

“Thinking generates entropy". So this provides us with a way to quantify "thinking".”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness

“If you want to do anything useful by processing information, you have to use logic.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 11: The Logic of Consciousness

“So we can define thinking as information processing, and we can consider the brain to be an information processing unit.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness

“Descartes declared that the mind was made of fundamentally different "stuff" to the rest of the body. The mind was non-physical, and was distinctly separable from the rest of the body.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness

“If it's cold, it's not conscious".”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 11: The Logic of Consciousness