Our five senses are faulty data-taking devices, and they need help.
The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge.
The brain can process two million bits of information per second. It remembers everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever heard.
Gradually the conviction gained recognition that all knowledge about things is exclusively a working-over of the raw material furnished by the senses. ... Galileo and Hume first upheld this principle with full clarity and decisiveness.
Are you smelling me?” After yesterday I suspected that my body was giving him all kinds of information I didn't want him to have. “Don't tempt me,” he murmured.
A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.
The eye and brain are not like a fax machine, nor are there little people looking at the images coming in.
We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.
We become in part what our senses take in.
I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearing -- it being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.
Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.
The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness.
To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.
When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards.
But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.
Nothing can be found in the intellect if previously has not been found in the senses.
