consciousness Quotes

Of course, genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought.

The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.

Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal.

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.

No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves.

It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.