Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.
David EaglemanTag: science religion spirituality science-vs-religion neuroscience
The seat of consciousness and intelligence was from the earliest times regarded by the Egyptians as both the heart and the bowels or abdomen. Our surgeon, however, has observed the fact that injuries to the brain affect other parts of the body, especially in his experience the lower limbs. He notes the drag or shuffle of one foot, presumably the partial paralysis resulting from a cranial wound, and the ancient commentator carefully explains the meaning of the obsolete word used for "shuffle.
James Henry BreastedTag: brain neuroscience ancient-egyptians ancient-medicine
The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?
Vernor VingeTag: reality free-will self-awareness neuroscience hormones
our moral reasoning is plagued by two illusions. The first illusion can be called the wag-the-dog illusion: We believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail). The second illusion can be called the wag-theother-dog's-tail illusion: In a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of an opponent's arguments to change the opponent's mind. Such a belief is like thinking that forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog happy.
Sam HarrisTag: morality atheism neuroscience
We—each of us—are intricately, irremovably connected to the larger universe. It is our true home, and thinking that this physical world is all that matters is like shutting oneself up in a small closet and imagining that there is nothing else out beyond it.
Eben AlexanderTag: science life spirituality neuroscience
The part of my brain that was responsible for creating the world I lived and moved in and for taking the raw data that came in through my senses and fashioning it into a meaningful universe: that part of my brain was down, and out. And yet despite all of this, I had been alive, and aware, truly aware, in a universe characterized above all by love, consciousness, and reality. There was, for me, simply no arguing this fact. I knew it so completely that I ached.
Eben AlexanderTag: science life spirituality neuroscience near-death-experience
The problem is, when you depend on a substitute for love, you can never get enough.
Louis CozolinoTag: love relationships neuroscience
The reason I said earlier that the mind is neither the Cartesian, highly intellectualized, cranium-confined firm-and-frozen ego, nor the self-effaced, world-immersed, flowing, field-like non-thingy occurrence, is that even though I was feeling my limbs to be alien to myself, that did not mean that I felt them to be disconnected. Rather, they were intimately connected, yet, merely connected to me, and not phenomenologically proper parts of myself. The mind-world boundary seems to have moved from the skin/environment junction to the innervated/denervated junction within the body. So part of the body has become external to the mind, or ‘de-minded’.
István AranyosiTag: philosophy neuroscience phenomenology neuropathy philosophy-of-mind
In truth, there is no such thing as an “intuitive boundary” of a sensory state. That most philosophers take such states as brain-bound is not an intuition, but a prejudice.
István AranyosiTag: pain philosophy self brain neuroscience phenomenology nervous-system sensory
Self-consciousness is, from a naturalistic point of view (in this case neurobiological), not more than a degree of sophistication of neural processes. The emergence of self-conscious states is not a drastic, extravagant, earth-shaking phenomenon.
István AranyosiTag: abortion neuroscience self-consciousness neural-development neuroethics
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