We get so intellectual that we forget that we're physical creatures.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
What I find fascinating is the idea that we all have a physical brain, but we also have this mental part, and we have to figure out how they work together.
We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.
In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' operate on precisely the same principles that we do.
We are animals, born from the land with the other species. Since we've been living in cities, we've become more and more stupid, not smarter. What made us survive all these hundreds of thousands of years is our spirituality; the link to our land.
I sometimes feel that we are losing an intuitive sense of our own bodies.
We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It's much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren't present here and now.
We want to build intelligence that augments human abilities and experiences.
Our bodies are hanging along for the ride, but my brain is talking to your brain. And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive, we really understand what brains are.
We can be eaten by techniques and forget what we have inside of us.
The pure natural scientist is liable to forget that minds exist, and that if it were not for them he could neither know nor act on physical objects.