Sublime

To be frank, science knows surprisingly little about mind and consciousness. Current orthodoxy holds that consciousness is created by electrochemical reactions in the brain, and that mental experiences fulfil some essential data-processing function.

Lashley’s principles seemed like a coverup” and that Lashley must have simply “concocted his doctrines.”42 Pietsch sought to disprove Lashley’s and Pribram’s theories by damaging salamander brains and examining whether they still exhibited feeding behavior.43 To his surprise, no matter what he did to the salamanders’ brains, they not only lived but

So long as its response was complex and autonomous, Dr Johnson would have been right to conclude that it was caused by something real, outside himself, and therefore that reality did not consist of himself alone.

Even the person who fears that he or she may be being fooled about literally everything else must know for sure that there is a ‘him’ or a ‘her’ who’s being fooled. The demon couldn’t fake that. ‘The proposition “I think, therefore I am”’, writes Descartes, ‘is the first and most certain which presents itself to whoever conducts his thoughts in

As Foucault neared the end of his defence, he summed up his central idea: Madness was not a fact of nature, but rather a ‘fact of civilisation’.[287] He closed with a final observation: To speak of madness one must have the talent of a poet. In the eerie quiet that followed, everyone in the room heard Canguilhem’s response: But you, sir, have

What [neuroscience] cannot do is replace the wide range of ordinary psychological explanations of human activities in terms of reasons, intentions, purposes, goals, values, rules and conventions by neurological explanations…For it makes no sense to ascribe such psychological attributes to anything less than the animal as a whole. It is the animal

In subsequent work he was able to locate neurological damage to the part of their brains that create and control our sense of body image. This damage had occurred at birth, or very early on. This meant that the brain could create a body image in a perfectly healthy person that was highly irrational. It seemed as well that our sense of self is far

If there was some mental activity that didn’t change the brain, it would prove Cartesian dualism and would be one of the most amazing discoveries of our time. But this will never happen because Cartesian dualism is mistaken.