Michele Pasin / Quotes

Consciousness emerges from the working brain

what does seem to be true is that consciousness does indeed emerge from complex physical events in the brain, even if we don’t know how it does so. Whatever the mechanism, we have thoughts and feelings because we have physical brains that work, not because there’s something else in our heads doing the mental work instead. The evidence for this is simple but overwhelming: damage the brain, and you impair consciousness. Change the chemicals in the brain, and you change consciousness. Stimulate certain parts of the brain, and you get a certain kind…

Saved 23 April 2015

#consciousness #emergence #brain #evidence

Biological naturalism

Suppose an animal gets a shortage of water in its system. The shortage of water will cause “saline imbalances” in the system, because the ratio of salt to…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #biological-naturalism #consciousness #brain #mind-body-problem

Consciousness anticipates the environment

Human consciousness then is something that the brain does, but not in response to the environment. Consciousness anticipates the environment. The environment…

Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) #consciousness #brain #perception

Consciousness as a system-level biological feature

The worst mistake is to suppose that the common-sense distinction between mental states naïvely construed and physical states naïvely construed is an…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #biological-naturalism #consciousness #brain

Consciousness as integrated information

applies it to consciousness. In a nutshell, the idea is that the level of consciousness you have is related to how many possible states your brain could be in…

Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) #consciousness #information #brain

For Descartes no material object is conscious

The problem for Descartes was not the general question of how a mental substance can arise out of neurobiology, because for him it cannot. His question was…

Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) #dualism #consciousness #brain