Thomas Nagel - Conscious Quotes

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Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

Thomas Nagel
I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails — simply in virtue of our mental concepts — that the system is conscious.

Thomas Nagel
The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future—though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.

Thomas Nagel
Materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants.

Thomas Nagel
Fundamentally 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.

Thomas Nagel