Mind Body Problem Quotes

“We're all prostitutes if you think about it. The whole capitalist system is built on meretriciousness. You sell your body or you sell your mind, and the Cartesian mind/body thing is a fallacy anyway, your mind is just your brain, so it amounts to the same thing really.”
― M. Thomas Gammarino, Big in Japan: A (Hungry) Ghost Story

“The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the
marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only,
but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings

“Positive arguments for the natural possibility of absent qualia have not been as prevalent as arguments for inverted qualia, but they have been made. The most detailed presentation of these arguments is given by Block (1978).

These arguments almost always have the same form. They consist in the exhibition of a realization of our functional organization in some unusual medium, combined with an appeal to intuition. It is pointed out, for example, that the organization of our brain might be simulated by the people of China or even mirrored in the economy of Bolivia. If we got every person in China to simulate a neuron (we would need to multiply the population by ten or one hundred, but no matter), and equipped them with radio links to simulate synaptic connections, then the functional organization would be there. But surely, says the argument, this baroque system would not be conscious!

There is a certain intuitive force to this argument. Many people have a strong feeling that a system like this is simply the wrong sort of thing to have a conscious experience. Such a “group mind” would seem to be the stuff of a science-fiction tale, rather than the kind of thing that could really exist. But there is only an intuitive force. This certainly falls far short of a knockdown argument. Many have pointed out that while it may be intuitively implausible that such a system should give rise to experience, it is equally intuitively implausible that a brain should give rise to experience! Whoever would have thought that this hunk of gray matter would be the sort of thing that could produce vivid subjective experiences? And yet it does. Of course this does not show that a nation's population could produce a mind, but it is a strong counter to the intuitive argument that it would not.
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Once we realize how tightly a specification of functional organization constrains the structure of a system, it becomes less implausible that even the population of China could support conscious experience if organized appropriately. If we take our image of the population, speed it up by a factor of a million or so, and shrink it into an area the size of a head, we are left with something that looks a lot like a brain, except that it has homunculi—tiny people—where a brain would have neurons. On the face of it, there is not much reason to suppose that neurons should do any better a job than homunculi in supporting experience.”
― David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

“[When the negative mind is neutralized through meditation], the body is set free to do what nature designed it to do: repair itself.”
― José Silva, The Silva Mind Control Method

“One starts from the experiential assumption
that the mind-body modality changes through the training of the
mind and body by means of cultivation (shugyo) or training (1ceiko).
Only after assuming this experiential ground does one ask what the
mind-body relation is. That is, the mind-body issue is not simply a
theoretical speculation but it is originally a practical, lived experience
(taiken), involving the mustering of one's whole mind and body. The
theoretical is only a reflection on this lived experience.”
― Yasuo Yuasa

“We invented a computer program capable of thinking non-numerically, and thereby solved and venerable mind/body problem, explaining how a system composed of matter can have the properties of mind. Opening the way to automate tasks that had previously required human intelligence.”
― Herbert A. Simon

“One of the main philosophical problems has always been the dualism between mind and matter. Although logical and rather obvious, this dualism becomes less logical and evident if we break the limitations of our senses and habitual thinking. This paradigm has established itself as almost the absolute truth, but is it true that there is a definite difference between mind and matter, or is matter only a property of mind, a creation of mind?”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Since we cannot think from a different frame of mind or perception except the one given to us by nature and established paradigms, we can hardly rationally comprehend where this dualism's secret lies or that there is no absolute dualism.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Matter, as something obvious and tangible, is all around us, but as we already know—what we perceive is only a presentation of the world to our senses through which we make the picture of the world. Our senses allow us to touch, smell, and feel love, pleasure, and pain. Everything looks material in a literal sense, yet what lives is only an idea translated through the senses. All we feel, touch, smell, and see exists because we not only touch it, smell it, and see it but are aware of it and have an idea about it. Beyond all we see or imagine, there is an overpowering mind. Without this, mind-matter is not only dead but is also not possible.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Matter is a manifestation of a Universal Mind and not something inherently different from the mind. Accepting our limitations allows us to see and understand what matters. In ancient times, the difference between body and mind was less significant to ancient than modern man. In this way, we become more perceptible and tuned to higher frequencies that lead us to ever creating and self-recreating Mind through matter as its program of life.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“If we could become accustomed to this kind of reasoning, we could recognize that what determines our usual way of thinking, not necessarily perception, which we often condition by thoughts, is the paradigm accepted as “absolute truth.” However, it may not be the truth. It is impossible to imagine anything as absolutely dead except something nonexistent, which is, on the other hand, not dead but only nonexistent.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“There is no actual death in the Universe, only a transition from one state to another. The fact that matter, for the most part, does not have an awareness of itself does not change this fact. Matter itself, in all its forms, is alive everywhere. This life is possible only through something which channels it and feeds it. That something is the Absolute Mind or what, often misused and misinterpreted, the word God means in a deeper and broader sense.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“We must use certain words; it is the main way to express our thoughts. Even with simple words, like mind and God, the matter becomes more complicated when we use them as terms with specific meanings outside their usual meaning. In this sense, God, as interpreted in most religious books, except in Buddhism, is not only personalized but becomes personal—he “listens” to and “cares” about us in a literal sense. On the other hand, the Absolute Mind is a different idea of the Being. However, what exists exists, regardless of our interpretation, and is not affected by our interpretations, except as a development of ourselves, which is, at the same time, the life of that of which we are part—of the Absolute Mind.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Immaterial essence is the primary quality; its “material” appearance is the secondary quality (primary quality to Locke), while the sensations are tertiary. The primary quality is the absolute quality of the Being (present yet immaterial and invisible). The secondary quality is the world as unaware information (unaware “awareness”)—perception and awareness cause the tertiary quality. Secondary and tertiary qualities are the result and degrees of the living mind (immaterial essence) in action.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“It may be that some are unwilling to accept the possibility of conscious thermostats simply because we understand thermostats too well. We know everything about their processing, and there seems no reason to invoke consciousness. But thermostats are really no different from brains here. Even once we understand brain processing perfectly, there will still seem to be no reason to invoke consciousness. The only difference is that right now, what is going on inside a brain is enough of a mystery that one may be tempted to suppose that consciousness is somehow “located” in those brain processes that we do not yet understand. But as I have argued, even coming to understand those processes will not alone bring consciousness into the picture; so here, once again, brains and thermostats are on a par.

One might be bothered by the fact that one could build a thermostat oneself, without putting any consciousness in. But of course the same applies to a brain, at least in principle. When we build a brain (in reproduction and development, say), consciousness conies along for free; the same will go for a thermostat. We should not expect to locate consciousness as a physical component of the system! Some may worry about the fact that a thermostat is not alive; but it is hard to see why that should make a principled difference. A disembodied silicon brain of the sort discussed in the last chapter would arguably fail to qualify as alive, but we have seen that it might be conscious. And if the arguments in the last chapter are right, then the fact that a thermostat is not made up of biological components makes no difference, in principle.”
― David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory