The Consciousness Instinct Quotes

“Pattee explains there is a basic and extremely important distinction between laws and rules in nature.11 Laws are inexorable, meaning they are unchangeable, inescapable, and inevitable. We can never alter or evade laws of nature. The laws of nature dictate that a car will stay in motion either until an equal and opposite force stops it or it runs out of energy. That is not something we can change. Laws are incorporeal, meaning they do not need embodiments or structures to execute them: there is not a physics policeman enforcing the car’s halt when it runs out of energy. Laws are also universal: they hold at all times in all places. The laws of motion apply whether you are in Scotland or in Spain. On the other hand, rules are arbitrary and can be changed. In the British Isles, the driving rule is to drive on the left side of the road. Continental Europe’s driving rule is to drive on the right side of the road. Rules are dependent on some sort of structure or constraint to execute them. In this case that structure is a police force that fines those who break the rules by driving on the wrong side. Rules are local, meaning that they can exist only when and where there are physical structures to enforce them. If you live out in the middle of the Australian outback, you are in charge. Drive on either side. There is no structure in place to restrain you! Rules are local and changeable and breakable. A rule-governed symbol is selected from a range of competitors for doing a better job constraining the function of the system it belongs to, leading to the production of a more successful phenotype. Selection is flexible; Newton’s laws are not. In their informational role, symbols aren’t dependent on the physical laws that govern energy, time, and rates of change. They follow none of Newton’s laws. They are lawless rule-followers! What this is telling us is that symbols are not locked to their meanings.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“Conscious linear thinking is hard work. I’m sweating it right now. It is as if our mind is a bubbling pot of water. Which bubble will make it up to the top at any given moment is hard to predict. The top bubble ultimately bursts into an idea, only to be replaced by more bubbles. The surface is forever energized with activity, endless activity, until the bubbles go to sleep. The arrow of time stitches it all together as each bubble comes up for its moment. Consider that maybe, just maybe, consciousness can be understood only as the brain’s bubbles, each with its own hardware to close the gap, getting its moment. If that sounds obscure, read the book to find out for yourself whether you can see it this way, too. Importantly, enjoy your thoughts as they bubble up to the surface of your own consciousness. PART I: GETTING READY FOR MODERN THOUGHT”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“You would not infer causality at all. Not only do you not infer that your neighbor is angry because you left the gate open and her dog got out, you don’t infer that the dog got out because you left the gate open. You don’t infer that the car won’t start because you left the radio on. While you would be good at spatial relations, you would not grasp the causes and effects described by physics. You will not infer any unobserved causal forces, whether they be gravitational or spiritual. For example, you would not infer that a ball moved because a force was transferred to it when it was hit by another, yet because of your inability to draw inferences, you would do better in Vegas at the gaming tables. You would bet with the house and not try to infer any causal relationship between winning and losing other than chance. No lucky tie or socks or tilt of the head. You would not string out some cockamamy story about why you did something or felt some way, not because you aren’t capable of language, but again because you don’t infer cause and effect. You won’t be a hypocrite and rationalize your actions. You would also not infer the gist of anything, but would take everything literally. You would have no understanding of metaphors or abstract ideas. Without inference you would be free of prejudice, yet not inferring cause and effect would make learning more difficult. What processing comes bubbling up in your separate hemispheres determines what the contents of that hemisphere’s conscious experience will be.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“In order to know the actual location of the electron, a measurement must be made, and here is where the troubles begin for the die-hard determinists. Once a measurement is made, the quantum state is said to collapse, meaning that all the other possible states the electron could have been in (known as superpositions) have collapsed into one. All the other possibilities have been eliminated. The measurement, of course, was irreversible and had constrained the system by causing the collapse. Over the next couple of years physicists realized that neither the classical concept of “particle” nor that of “wave” could fully describe the behavior of quantum-scale objects at any one point in time. As Feynman quipped, “They don’t behave like a wave or like a particle, they behave quantum mechanically.”18”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“There obviously is a different feel to a wave of intense emotion versus an abstract thought, but each conscious form is an experience that gives us a unique perception of reality. The pattern in which these various conscious forms come in and out of awareness gives us our own personal life story. The vast variety of conscious forms and the ubiquity of consciousness in the brain are best explained by a modular architecture of the brain. The conceptual challenge now is to understand how hundreds, if not thousands, of modules, embedded in a layered architecture—each layer of which can produce a form of consciousness—give us a single, unified life experience at any given moment that seems to flow flawlessly into the next across time.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“In the brain, the amount of the neurotransmitter dopamine affects the process of salience acquisition and expression. During an acute psychotic state, schizophrenia is associated with an increase in dopamine synthesis, dopamine release, and resting-state synaptic dopamine concentrations.10 Kapur suggests that in psychosis, there is a malfunction in the regulation of dopamine, causing abnormal firing of the dopamine system, leading to the aberrant levels of the neurotransmitter and, thus, aberrant assignment of motivational salience to objects, people, and actions.11 Research supports this claim.12 The altered salience of sensory stimuli results in a conscious experience with very different contents than would normally be there, yet those contents are what constitute Mr. B’s reality and provide the experiences that his cognition must make sense of. When considering the contents of Mr. B’s conscious experience, his hallucinations, his efforts to make sense of his delusions are no longer so wacky, but are possible, though not probable, explanations of what he is experiencing. With this in mind, the behavior that results from his cognitive conclusion seems somewhat more rational. And despite suffering this altered brain function, Mr. B continues to be conscious and aware of his existence.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“Shitij Kapur, a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and professor at King’s College London, distinguishes for us the difference between hallucinations and delusions: “Hallucinations reflect a direct experience of the aberrant salience of internal representations,” whereas delusions (false beliefs) are the result of “a cognitive effort by the patient to make sense of these aberrantly salient experiences.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“While there are more neural connections within a half brain than between the two halves, there are still massive connections across the hemispheres. Even so, cutting those connections does little to one’s sense of conscious experience. That is to say, the left hemisphere keeps on talking and thinking as if nothing had happened even though it no longer has access to half of the human cortex. More important, disconnecting the two half brains instantly creates a second, also independent conscious system. The right brain now purrs along carefree from the left, with its own capacities, desires, goals, insights, and feelings. One network, split into two, becomes two conscious systems. How could one possibly think that consciousness arises from a particular specific network? We need a new idea to cope with this fact.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“Unfortunately, even though Thomas Nagel would love it, technology today does not permit us to truly understand how different organisms experience the world. Often it is even difficult for us to understand our own perception of the world. The best we can do to empirically understand the experience of others, both animals and people, is to use behavioral and brain-activity measurements.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“People with a right parietal lobe injury, for example, will commonly suffer from a syndrome called spatial hemi-neglect. Depending on the size and location of the lesion, patients with hemi-neglect may behave as if part or all of the left side of their world, which may include the left side of their body, does not exist! This could include not eating off the left side of their plate, not shaving or putting makeup on the left side of their face, not drawing the left side of a clock, not reading the left pages of a book, and not acknowledging anything or anyone in the left half of the room. Some will deny that their left arm and leg are theirs and will not use them when trying to get out of bed, even though they are not paralyzed. Some patients will even neglect the left side of space in their imagination and memories.3 That the deficits vary according to the size and location of the lesion suggests that damage that disrupts specific neural circuits results in impairments in different component processes.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“Nagel states that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” “Like” does not mean “resemble,” such as in the question “What is ice skating like? Is it like roller skating?” Instead, it concerns the subjective qualitative feel of the experience, that is, what it feels like for the subject: “What is ice skating like for you?” (For instance, is it exhilarating?) Nagel called this the “subjective character of experience.” It has also been called “phenomenal consciousness,” and, although he doesn’t say it, it is also referred to as qualia.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“Evolutionary theories allowed materialist theories of consciousness to come in two flavors: emergentism and panpsychism. The former proposes that consciousness emerges from unconscious matter once that matter achieves a certain level of complexity or organization. Sperry was leaning heavily in this direction. The latter, panpsychism, tosses the whole problem out by suggesting that all matter has subjective consciousness, albeit in a wide range of types. The idea here is that there is no need for the idea of emergence and complexity to explain consciousness. Consciousness is a primordial feature of all things, from rocks to ants to us.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“Schopenhauer’s framing kicked the problem of consciousness onto a much larger playing field. The mind, with all of its rational processes, is all very well but the “will,” the thing that gives us our “oomph,” is the key: “The will … again fills the consciousness through wishes, emotions, passions, and cares.”14 Today, the subconscious rumblings of the “will” are still unplumbed; only a few inroads have been made. As I write these words, enthusiasts for the artificial intelligence (AI) agenda, the goal of programming machines to think like humans, have completely avoided and ignored this aspect of mental life. That is why Yale’s David Gelernter, one of the leading computer scientists in the world, says the AI agenda will always fall short, explaining, “As it now exists, the field of AI doesn’t have anything that speaks to emotions and the physical body, so they just refuse to talk about it.” He asserts that the human mind includes feelings, along with data and thoughts, and each particular mind is a product of a particular person’s experiences, emotions, and memories hashed and rehashed over a lifetime: “The mind is in a particular body, and consciousness is the work of the whole body.” Putting it in computer lingo, he declares, “I can run an app on any device, but can I run someone else’s mind on your brain? Obviously not.”15”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“How on earth does lifeless matter become the building blocks for living things? How do neurons turn into minds? What should be the vocabulary used to describe the interactions between the brain and its mind? When humankind finds some answers, will we be disheartened by what they are? Will our future understanding of “consciousness” simply not be fulfilling? Will it be simple yet cold and harsh?”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“Do the lingering ideas of the past block us from seeing clearly how it comes about? Is consciousness just what brains do? Just as a pocket watch with all of its gears tells us the time, do brains with all their neurons just give us consciousness? The history of the topic is vast, swept by pendulum swings between the pure mechanists and the hopeful mentalists. Surprisingly, twenty-five hundred years of human history have not resolved the question or taught our species how to frame an understanding of our personal conscious experience. Indeed, our core ideas have not changed that much. While thinking explicitly about consciousness was ignited by Descartes three hundred years ago, two overarching and contradictory notions—that the mind either is part of the brain’s workings or works somehow independently of the brain—have been around seemingly forever. Indeed, these ideas are still with us.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“The list is long, and we humans seem to have more instincts than other creatures.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“Plainly stated, I believe consciousness is an instinct.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“Dennett handles this problem by denying it. He laments that one of the problems with explaining consciousness is that we all think we are consciousness experts, and have very strong beliefs about it, just because we have experienced it. He complains that this doesn’t happen to vision researchers. Even though most of us can see, we don’t think we are vision experts. Dennett claims that consciousness is the result of a bag of tricks: our subjective experience is an illusion, a very believable one, one that we fall for every time, even when it has been explained to us how it comes about physically, just like some optical illusions that still fool us even though we know how they work.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“The first visit involves the challenge of the unknown, curiosity, adventure, often youth, and sometimes adrenaline. On a revisit, you are returning older, with more life experience under your belt, to familiar territory; it is not so challenging, your curiosity is not so piqued, you know more or less what to expect, you have less adrenaline pumping. You feel different, not necessarily worse or better, just different. This is true not just for returning to locales but also for trying to recapture any past experience.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“Split-brain patients act in a unique way. It appeared the left, speaking hemisphere initially offered a utilitarian response to all scenarios. Thus, if an act had mal-intent but no harm came from it, it was judged as “permissible.” And if an act did not have mal-intent, but resulted in harm, it was judged “forbidden.” Given the clarity of the stories used, this was a jarring result. What is going on? The disconnected left hemisphere is unable to take into account the intent of the person in the stories, acting as if it didn’t have a theory of mind.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“There is a classic observation that rings true across all of biology. The observation concerns whether organisms learn and take instruction from the environment or whether the reactions that organisms have to environmental stimuli are managed by systems already built into the organism. The “selection versus instruction” debate has raged for years and has especially caught the limelight in the field of immunology. Put simply, when something foreign enters the body and there is an immune response to it, are the antibodies formed then and there around the foreign body, and do they then multiply (instruction)? Or does the antibody already exist, and is the immune response time the time it takes to find the preexisting antibody (selection) and jerk it into action? In the previous century, biology learned it is the latter situation, a finding that illustrates that a whole lot of stuff comes with the package—standard equipment for our bodies and brains.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“It’s difficult to get our heads around the idea that each bubble has its own capacity to evoke that feeling of being conscious; it rubs up against our own intuitions about the holistic nature of our personal consciousness. What are we and our intuitions missing? We are missing the illusion part, the part we humans (with our powerful left hemisphere inference mechanism) are so good at missing. We aren’t actually missing the illusion; rather, we are missing the fact that our smoothly flowing consciousness is itself an illusion. In reality it is made up of cognitive bubbles linked with subcortical “feeling” bubbles, stitched together by our brain in time.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“Consciousness is not the product of a special network that enables all of our mental events to be conscious. Instead, each mental event is managed by brain modules that possess the capacity to make us conscious of the results of their processing. The results bubble up from various modules like bubbles in a boiling pot of water. Bubble after bubble, each the end result of a module’s or a group of modules’ processing, pops up and bursts forth for a moment, only to be replaced by others in a constant dynamic motion. Those single bursts of processing parade one after another, seamlessly linked by time. (This metaphor is limited to bubbles roiling up at a rate of twelve frames a second or faster; or consider a cartoon flip book, where the faster we snap the pages, the more continuous the movements of the characters appear.)”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“When communication between the hemispheres is lost, each is unaware of the other’s knowledge and each functions independently based on the information it receives. Both sides of the brain try to complete the task independently, resulting in the tug-of-war. By this simple task, the illusion of a unified consciousness is exposed. Clearly, if consciousness arose from a single location, then a split-brain patient would be unable to have two simultaneous experiences!”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“How come the left brain doesn’t complain about the fact that it is no longer conscious of things on the left side of space? Imagine having your brain disconnected. Imagine waking up in your hospital room the next morning and, as your surgeon walks in to see how you are faring, you only see the left half of her face. Don’t you think you would notice that the right half is not there? The thing is, you would not. In fact, your left hemisphere wouldn’t even be conscious of the fact that there is a left half of space. But this is the weird part: I spoke as if the new, split version of you were just your left hemisphere, and that is not true. You are also your right hemisphere. The new “yous” have two minds with two completely separate pools of perceptual and cognitive information. It is just that only one of the minds can readily speak. The other initially cannot. Perhaps, after many years, it will be able to produce a few words.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“It was also the test that produced the most astounding observation of all. The left, talking brain didn’t seem to miss the right brain, and vice versa. It didn’t just not miss it—it didn’t even remember it or the functions it had performed, as if the right hemisphere had never existed. For me, this phenomenon is the single most important fact students of mind/brain research must take into account.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“W.J. was a warm, affable man, and the two hemispheres of his brain seemed to be working fine together, although they were no longer in direct communication. One of them talked, one of them didn’t. Given the way the brain is wired, that meant the left, talking brain viewed the visual world to the right of a fixated point and the right, non-talking hemisphere viewed all the visual information to the left of the same point. Given this surgical state, I wondered: If I flashed a light over to the right, would W.J. say he saw it? Light should go to the left hemisphere, and the left hemisphere had speech; it should be easy. It was, and W.J. easily declared he saw it. A bit later, I flashed the same light over to the left side of space and waited to see if he would say anything. He didn’t. I pressed him and asked if he had seen anything, and he firmly said “No.” Was he blind on that side? Or was that simple spot of light no longer communicated to the half brain that talked? Did the seemingly mute right brain know it had viewed a light? Was it conscious? What was going on?”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“I am not suggesting that single cells are conscious. I am suggesting that they may have some type of processing that is necessary or similar to the processing that results in conscious experience.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“Von Neumann, in his thought experiment about self-replication, had written that he had avoided the “most intriguing, exciting, and important question of why the molecules or aggregates that in nature really occur … are the sorts of thing they are, why they are essentially very large molecules in some cases but large aggregations in other cases.”20 Pattee suggested that it is the very size of the molecules that ties the quantum and classical worlds together: “Enzymes are small enough to take advantage of quantum coherence to attain the enormous catalytic power on which life depends, but large enough to attain high specificity and arbitrariness in producing effectively decoherent products that can function as classical structures.”21 Quantum coherence basically means that subatomic particles sync together to “cooperate” to produce decoherent products, which are particles that do not have quantum properties. Pattee notes that there is now research that supports his proposal that enzymes require quantum effects22 and that life would be impossible in a strictly quantum world.23 Both are needed: a quantum layer and a classical physical layer.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind

“During replication, those nucleotides are read and translated into linear strings of amino acids (which make up enzymes and proteins) by a rule-governed process. The set of rules is called the genetic code. The DNA contains the sequence, but the code is implemented by RNA molecules. Certain DNA sequences, called codons, which are made up of three nucleotides, symbolize certain amino acid sequences. There is no ambiguity, but there is also not just one codon for each amino acid. For example, six different codons symbolize arginine, but only one codon symbolizes tryptophan. But the components of the DNA sequence (the symbol) do not resemble the components of the amino acid sequence (its meaning), just as the words that symbolize the components of a recipe do not resemble the components themselves.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind