A Quote by Thomas Nagel

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

Thomas Nagel

Quote Topics

Body Consciousness Hopeless Interesting Less Mind Much Problem Seems Without Would Would Be

Quote Author

Thomas Nagel
Yugoslavian - Philosopher
Born: July 4, 1937

What is required is faith. Man has body, life and mind but that is not all that constitutes man. He has risen to the mind as a result of evolution. Now a higher consciousness will be evolved - this I call Supermind. It is the instrument of the Divine Consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo

You are so accustomed to think of yourselves as bodies having consciousness that you just cannot imagine consciousness as having bodies. Once you realize that bodily existence is but a state of mind, a movement in consciousness, that the ocean of consciousness is infinite and eternal, and that, when in touch with consciousness, you are the witness only, you will be able to withdraw beyond consciousness altogether.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

One can see light above the head; that indicates a consciousness outside the body. But that itself is not the Truth-Consciousness or Vijnana. But much light descending from there illumines this consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo

For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.

Alan Lightman

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

Thomas Nagel

This intelligence itself is modified into what we call egoism, and this intelligence is the cause of all the powers in the body. It covers the whole ground, sub-consciousness, consciousness, and super-consciousness.

Swami Vivekananda

The arguments for immortality, weak when you take them one by one, are no more cogent when you take them together... For my part, I cannot see how consciousness can persist when its physical basis has been destroyed, and I am too sure of the interconnection of my body and my mind to think that any survival of my my consciousness apart from my body would be in any sense a survival of myself.

W. Somerset Maugham

You exist in time, but you belong to eternity- You are a penetration of eternity into the world of time-You are deathless, living in a body of death- Your consciousness knows no death, no birth- It is only your body that is born and dies-But you are not aware of your consciousness-You are not conscious of your consciousness-And that is the whole art of meditation;Becoming conscious of consciousness itself.

Rajneesh

Consciousness is the ground of all being; everything is consciousness. Beyond that, definition is impossible because any way we may attempt to define it would limit consciousness.

Ricky Ray

The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.

Willard Van Orman Quine

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.

Antonio Damasio

The mind, the body and the world are made out of Consciousness but Consciousness is not made out of them. It is made out of itself. Therefore everything is made only out of Consciousness.

Rupert Spira

The consciousness of the supreme Purusha remains above, but in the mind there may be a Purusha consciousness which they call the cosmic consciousness - it is wide, all-pervading, one. Outside this goes on the play of Prakriti.

Sri Aurobindo

Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology - we are quite unable to imagine the contrary...