Consciousness Quotes

“Make a decision, trust yourself and stick with it.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“It was only as a mature man that I became mortal.
The visceral insight of my end came to me abruptly more than a dozen years ago. I had wasted an entire evening playing an addictive, firstperson shooter video game that belonged to my teenage son—running through eerily empty halls, flooded corridors, nightmarishly twisting tunnels, and empty plazas under a foreign sun, emptying my weapons at hordes of aliens pursuing me relentlessly. I went to bed late and, as always, fell asleep easily. I awoke abruptly a few hours later. Knowledge had turned to certainty
—I was going to die! Not right there and then, but someday.
...
My interpretation of this queer event is that all the killing in the video game triggered
unconscious thoughts about the annihilation of the self. These processes produced sufficient anxiety that my cortico-thalamic complex woke up on its own, without any external trigger. At that point, self-consciousness lit up and was confronted with its mortality.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“Humanity is not condemned to wander forever in an epistemological fog, knowing only the surface appearance of things but never their true nature.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“The history of any scientific concept—energy, atom, gene, cancer, memory—is one of increased differentiation and sophistication until it can be explained in a quantitative and mechanistic manner at a lower, more elemental level.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“We have rooms in ourselves. Most of them we have not visited yet. Forgotten rooms. From time to time we can find the passage. We find strange things . . . old phonographs, pictures, books . . . they belong to us, but it is the first time we have found them.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland by George Gamow,”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“We are, quite literally, star dust.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“there is but a single reality out there, and science is getting increasingly better at describing it.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

“I pondered the significance of my personal annihilation for the next several months, facing down an existentialist abyss of oblivion and meaningless within me. Eventually, through some unconscious process of recalibration, I returned to my basic attitude that all is as it should be. There is no other way I can describe it: no mountaintop conversion or flash of deep insight, but a sentiment that suffuses my life. I wake up each morning to find myself in a world full of mystery and beauty. And I'm profoundly thankful for the wonder of it all.
Here I am, a highly organized pattern of mass and energy, one of seven billion, insignificant in any objective accounting of the world. And in short while I will case to exist. What am I to the universe? Practically nothing. Yet the certainty of my death makes my life more significant. My joy in life, in my children, my love to dogs, running and climbing, books and music, the cobalt blue sky, are meaningful because I will come to an end. And that is as it should be. I do not know what will come afterward, if there is an afterward in the usual sense of the world, but whatever it is, I know in my bones that everything is for the best.”
― Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist