A Quote by Susan Blackmore

Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes.

Susan Blackmore

Quote Topics

Complex Consciousness Free Free Will Illusion Memes Self Will

Quote Author

Susan Blackmore
English - Writer
Born: July 29, 1951

Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.

Susan Blackmore

The self (Soul) is the constant-witness consciousness. Through all months, seasons and years, through all divisions of time, the past, present and future the consciousness remains one and self luminous. It neither rises nor sets. The ultimate self is free from sin, free from old age, free from death and grief, free from hunger and thirst, which desires nothing and imagines nothing.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

The part of you that is unhampered by illusion-the illusion of time, the illusion of powerlessness, the illusion of impossibility-i s waiting for you to slow down and open up so that it can speak to your consciousness. In some unguarded moment, you will hear its wildly improbable words and know that they are guiding you home.

Martha Beck

If the Internet can be described as a giant human consciousness, then viral marketing is the illusion of free will.

George Pendle

As always, the illusion of self-transcendence is far more facile and available than self-transcendence itself: in the vast majority of cases what human consciousness opens up to is merely a more encompassing form of finitude (another captivating illusion or delusion).

Kenny Smith

To be free from bondage the wise person must practise discrimination between One-Self and the ego-self. By that alone you will become full of joy, recognising Self as Pure Being, Consciousness and Bliss.

Adi Shankara

Great acting can be almost a psychotic mix of self-consciousness and unself-consciousness. And thats the terrible conflict. You have to be free to jump off into that volcano and you have to be pathologically self-conscious.

Alec Baldwin

Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states - “fear societies” and “free societies.”… The two societies make up two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped … In contrast, the consciousness of freedom … is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry … It builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect.

Naomi Wolf

Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced; but "lies asleep."

H. P. Blavatsky

And that is enough to raise your thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride… Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

C. S. Lewis

We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world.. ..If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictoral equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.

Mark Rothko

If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.

Albert Einstein

The time is probably not far distant when music will stand revealed perchance as the mightiest of the arts, and certainly as the one art peculiarly representative of our modern world, with its intense life, complex civilization, and feverish self-consciousness.

Hugh Reginald Haweis

If we have free will, by definition we cannot be granted it. We can't be given it. My [-audio-recording-distorted-] paradox states that 'Of course we have free will, we have no choice.' To say that it's a gift is to negate the whole concept of free will on its face. So, if that isn't self-evident, I can't think of anything that would meet the definition of being self-evident.

Christopher Hitchens

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.