Hidden In Plain Sight 9 Quotes

“So we can define thinking as information processing, and we can consider the brain to be an information processing unit.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness

“Thinking generates entropy". So this provides us with a way to quantify "thinking".”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness

“As our bodies grow old and maybe painful, our minds can stay young, apparently impervious to the ravages of time. I have often heard an old person say that they feel the same in their mind as they did when they were young — I feel the same way myself (though I do not yet consider myself old). It is as if the physical world cannot affect our mind.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness

“Descartes declared that the mind was made of fundamentally different "stuff" to the rest of the body. The mind was non-physical, and was distinctly separable from the rest of the body.”
― Andrew H. Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness

“With it being so easy to produce such dramatically random behaviour from a few nonlinear components, it is easy to imagine how a small module of chaotic circuitry in our unconscious brain could be responsible for our random creativity and flashes of inspiration apparently appearing "out of nowhere". There is surely no need to imagine that any more exotic processes — such as random quantum processes — would need to be involved to generate our creativity and inventiveness. In the December 1986 issue of Scientific American, a major article on chaos described this possibility: "Innate creativity may have an underlying chaotic process that selectively amplifies small fluctuations and molds them into macroscopic coherent mental states that are experienced as thoughts. In some cases the thoughts may be decisions, or what are perceived to be the exercise of will. In this light, chaos provides a mechanism that allows for free will within a world governed by deterministic laws.”
― Andrew Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness

“To divide all the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as many as were required to solve them in the best way, and to conduct my thoughts in a given order, beginning with the simplest and most easily understood objects, and gradually ascending, as it were step by step, to the knowledge of the most complex.”
― Andrew Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness

“I have long contended that consciousness is the way information feels.”
― Andrew Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness

“Leibniz imagined the mind as a large machine, a processing unit, a factory, a mechanism — which seems fair enough. Leibniz imagined walking around a large mill. You would see cogs and levers moving, but, as David Eagleman says: "It would be preposterous to suggest that the mill is thinking or feeling or perceiving. How could a mill fall in love or enjoy a sunset? A mill is just made of pieces and parts. And so it is with the brain, Leibniz asserted. If you could expand the brain to the size of a mill and stroll around inside it, you would only see pieces and parts. When we look inside the brain, we see neurons, synapses, chemical transmitters, electrical activity. We see billions of active, chattering cells. Where are you? Where are your thoughts? Your emotions? To Leibniz, the mind seemed inexplicable by mechanical causes.”
― Andrew Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness

“Innate creativity may have an underlying chaotic process that selectively amplifies small fluctuations and molds them into macroscopic coherent mental states that are experienced as thoughts. In some cases the thoughts may be decisions, or what are perceived to be the exercise of will. In this light, chaos provides a mechanism that allows for free will within a world governed by deterministic laws.”
― Andrew Thomas, Hidden In Plain Sight 9: The Physics Of Consciousness