Moses Rabuka

“Historically, brain metaphors have often drawn on the impressive machines of the day. For example, brains were once analogized to clocks and mills when those were cutting-edge technologies. More recently, scientists have compared minds with looms, as in one precomputer-era quote comparing a brain to that "enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“to date, no scientist or philosopher has charted a plausible path from the intricate gray-and-white folds of the cortex to the felt experience of an early winter’s day at the end of fall semester, an experience that layers perception and memory and feeling—all that information—with something that seems so much greater than information itself, a purely subjective quality that feels rich beyond words and indelible.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“Our senses exist mainly to refine, or error-correct, our minds’ best guesses as to what we’re experiencing.”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

“Yet what are we to make of the fact that there is a whole suite of chemicals that, when introduced into the brain, utterly change our experience of consciousness? Think of how the caffeine in coffee subtly sharpens the feeling of being alive (or at least awake), or how the psilocybin in a mushroom (and what could be more material than a mushroom?!) can radically alter our sense of self and our subjective experience of the world. The fact that consciousness can be altered by chemicals does not necessarily prove that consciousness is, at its core, a material phenomenon, but it would seem to lend at least some credence to the idea.[* 7]”
― Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness