Cognition Quotes

“When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“There are two circumstances that lead to arrogance: one is when you're wrong and you can't face it; the other is when you're right and nobody else can face it.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The exaggerated dopamine sensitivity of the introvert leads one to believe that when in public, introverts, regardless of its validity, often feel to be the center of (unwanted) attention hence rarely craving attention. Extroverts, on the other hand, seem to never get enough attention. So on the flip side it seems as though the introvert is in a sense very external and the extrovert is in a sense very internal - the introvert constantly feels too much 'outerness' while the extrovert doesn't feel enough 'outerness'.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.”
― Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language

“It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“God judges men from the inside out; men judge men from the outside in. Perhaps to God, an extreme mental patient is doing quite well in going a month without murder, for he fought his chemical imbalance and succeeded; oppositely, perhaps the healthy, able and stable man who has never murdered in his life yet went a lifetime consciously, willingly never loving anyone but himself may then be subject to harsher judgment than the extreme mental patient. It might be so that God will stand for the weak and question the strong.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Any human endeavor rooted in the pursuit of truth must rely on fact and not feelings.”
― Gad Saad, Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense

“The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows that our thinking and behavior are often completely illogical. In one study, for example, groups of people were independently asked how much they would give to prevent waterfowl from being killed in polluted oil ponds. On average, the subjects said they would pay $80 to save 2,000 birds, $78 to save 20,000 birds, and $88 to save 200,000 birds. Sometimes animals act more logically than people do; a recent study found that when picking a new home, the decisions of ant colonies were more rational than those of human house-hunters.
What is it about human psychology that makes it so difficult for us to think consistently about animals? The paradoxes that plague our interactions with other species are due to the fact that much of our thinking is a mire of instinct, learning, language, culture, intuition, and our reliance on mental shortcuts.”
― Hal Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

“But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“As long as I stared at the clock, at least the world remained in motion. Not a very consequential world, but in motion nonetheless. And as long as I knew the world was still in motion, I knew I existed. Not a very consequential existence, but an existence nonetheless. It struck me as wanting that someone should confirm his own existence only by the hands of an electric wall clock. There had to be a more cognitive means of confirmation. But try as I might, nothing less facile came to mind.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“Question the answers, I repeated every class. Reevaluate your conclusions when the evidence changes.”
― Craig M. Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education

“Cognition reigns but does not rule.”
― Paul Valéry

“There is a sense in which all cognition can be said to be motivated. One is motivated to understand the world, to be in touch with reality, to remove doubt, etc. Alternately one might say that motivation is an aspect of cognition itself. Nevertheless, motives like wanting to find the truth, not wanting to be mistaken, etc., tend to align with epistemic goals in a way that many other commitments do not. As we have begun to see, all reasoning may be inextricable from emotion. But if a person's primary motivation in holding a belief is to hue to a positive state of mind, to mitigate feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, or guilt for instance. This is precisely what we mean by phrases like "wishful thinking", and "self-deception". Such a person will of necessity be less responsive to valid chains of evidence and argument that run counter to the beliefs he is seeking to maintain. To point out non-epistemic motives in an others view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt on a persons connection to the world as it is.”
― Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

“Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing.”
― Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It

“If the brain was simple enough to be understood - we would be too simple to understand it!”
― Minsky M.A.

“I wanted that future officer to weigh decisions with a supple mind and to be comfortable with nuance and uncertainty. ”
― Craig M. Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education

“Conscience is not a dead constant, it is a living, breathing, ever-evolving force of progress – a force of upliftment.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Conscience over Nonsense

“As historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to TALK with their texts. In plain English, they pretend to deliberate with others by talking to themselves.”
― Sam Wineburg

“Nothing is wrong with you. Your environment has quietly changed.”
― A. Jacobs, The Age of Drift: Why Modern Life Feels Fake – and What Reality Drift Reveals About the Modern Mind

“What is life but a confusing algorithm when you are aware, or a controlled simulation when you are not?”
― F.C. Quiles, Dismantled: A Theory of Broken Mindsets—A Blueprint of Infinite Futures

“Textbooks are like visible light, they only reveal a tiny, microscopic, biased sliver of reality, while 99.9965% of the electromagnetic spectrum remain nonexistent to the mighty brains of apekind. Real education happens outside the textbook.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“Of course, if he chooses, a person can also take it into his head to find an order in the stars, the galaxies, an order in the lighted windows of the empty skyscrapers where between nine and midnight the cleaning women wax the floors of the offices. Rationalize, that's the big task: rationalize if you don't want everything to come apart.”
― Italo Calvino, t zero

“Vegetables with limbs (Sonnet 2824)

Now more than ever, if the human race
stops doing art, writing literature,
writing philosophy, poetry, code,
writing songs, music and mathematics, because
apparently generative ai can do all of that,
soon indistinguishable from the human article,

then this is the exact moment in history
when the human brain, particularly
the prefrontal cortex, starts to shrink,
rendering our species into vegetable with limbs.

Generative AI is going to have
the biggest impact on brain evolution,
since primitive humans learnt
to harness fire, for better or worse.

I'm not asking you to avoid ai altogether,
even if you try you cannot, any more than
you can refuse internet or electricity,
because, more and more, ai is going to infiltrate
every aspect of the global tech infrastructure -

all I'm saying is, get your priorities straight,
no matter what you do in any other aspect of life,
keep the central art of your life untouched by ai,
use ai as assistant, not as ghostwriter.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“Generative AI is going to have the biggest impact on brain evolution, since primitive humans learnt to harness fire, for better or worse.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth

“You’re the calm and the cognitive storm!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth