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Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.

Consciousness, for me, is a manifestation of complexity in biology. It's an emergent property.

Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture.

People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it.

We can actually accelerate the process through meditation, through the ability to find stillness through loving actions, through compassion and sharing, through understanding the nature of the creative process in the universe and having a sense of connection to it. So, that's conscious evolution.

Consciousness allows you the capacity to plan.

Genetics do play a role in how you consciously or subconsciously manifest your true self.