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Quote by Richard Flanagan

“I wrote. Something. Yes. And you were truthful. No. You weren't truthful? I was accurate.”

Book:The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Work

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

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Author

Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan is an Australian novelist known for his profound character development and rich narrative techniques. His works often explore themes of history, family, and personal identity, with novels like 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' and 'The Rich Boy' receiving widespread acclaim. more

“You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for? Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial. Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other. But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you. Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it. Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers. Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift- wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back.”

Mind Brain Consciousness

Author:Peter Watts

“From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.”

Mind Beauty Artificial Idealism Sublime

Author:Thomas Paine

“Although we are always influenced by brain or mental events to form the intentions we do, sometimes (and in particular when we are taking difficult moral decisions) no such events fully determine those intentions. We have a certain freedom to form intentions to act independently of all the influences to which we are subject, which I shall call ‘free will’ [...] given that that is our situation, we are often morally responsible for our actions—guilty and deserving blame for doing what we believe wrong, meritorious and deserving praise for doing what we believe to be good actions beyond obligation.”

Mind Philosophy Morality Free Will Moral Responsibility

Book:Mind, Brain, and Free Will

Source: Mind, Brain, and Free Will

“As Einstein once said, “It is the theory which decides what can be observed.” But I must add that prior to theory there is what we call “thinking”—a systematic form of consciousness deeply driven by the unconscious that enables understanding and experimental predictions The parallel is expressed in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (KJV). For humans, all beginnings are in thought or reason. And in the reductionist search for reality, science can only identify mind, first in thing shopped for, then in the assurance of unseen evidence.”

Mind Religion Experience Unseen Einstein Reductionism