Sentience Quotes

“You respond to sensory stimulation with the makings of an action— never completed—appropriate to what's happening and how you feel about it. And then you read your own response so as to get a mental picture of it.”
― Nicholas Humphrey, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness

“Broad's classic work of philosophy was a tome called The Mind and Its Place in Nature.12 In it, he argued that the mind is partly material and partly psychic. He was impressed by the evidence gathered by the Society for Psychical Research for the persistence of the human mind after death. What he found particularly con-vincing were spiritualist seances where a dead person, contacted by a medium, proved able to disclose information presumably unknown to anyone else. Yet, careful thinker that he was, he had a major reservation. He couldn't but remark that most messages from the dead were decidedly off-key, as if after death the mind becomes degraded morally and intellectually.”
― Nicholas Humphrey, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness