Neural Processes Quotes

Might we... be doing something with our brains that cannot be described in computational terms at all? How do our feelings of conscious awareness - of happiness, pain, love, aesthetic sensibility, will, understanding, etc. - fit into such a computational picture?

The self is a perpetually recreated neurobiological state.

It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time!

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.

The brain happens to be a meat machine.

The brain is a mystery; it has been and still will be. How does the brain produce thoughts? That is the central question and we have still no answer to it.

I think we're all fascinated and a little mystified by how the brain works. One of the most mysterious of the physical sciences is neurological science.

We know a certain amount about neurons. You can do fMRI and watch parts of the brain light up. But what happens in the middle is poorly understood.

Physiology seeks to derive the processes in our own nervous system from general physical forces, without considering whether these processes are or are not accompanied by processes of consciousness.

A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.

Minds are simply what brains do.

The genetic you and the neural you aren't alternatives to the conscious you. They are its foundations.

I don't know about you, but I find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical, mechanistic understanding of the mind, even if it's the mind of the fly.

I finally chalked it up to the fact that the brain is truly an extraordinary device: more extraordinary than we can even guess.

We are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. That understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.

The drives you take for granted ("I'm a hetero/homosexual," "I'm attracted to children/adults," "I'm aggressive/not aggressive," and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery.

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.