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The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness QUOTES

The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness QUOTES

1 " A logical argument and a story are two ways of putting fragments in proper relationship and guessing where the whole sequence leads and how it gets there. This is the logic-versus-narrative axis. Spectrum Law: The mind is in business to make sense. Up-spectrum, it makes sense by making logic. Down-spectrum, it makes sense by creating stories. "

― David Gelernter , The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness

2 " Long ago, an eminent professor of philosophy interrupted a lecture on Descartes to relate this story to the class: “A friend I hadn’t seen for years told me, ‘Do you know what your most obvious personal trait is? It’s this.’ ” The trait itself remained a secret; we had to guess. The professor continued: “I couldn’t believe it. It seemed absurd. Absolutely absurd. When I got home that day I told my wife, ‘Can you believe what my friend described as my most obvious personal trait? This!’ And my wife said, ‘But of course.’ ” Seeing things that are too close instead of too distant to make out clearly is one definition of philosophy and the philosophical method. “How hard I find it,” writes Wittgenstein, “to see what is right in front of my eyes!”14 Authorities agree: we do not know ourselves. So it is no surprise, after all, that we do not know the spectrum that describes our own minds. "

― David Gelernter , The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness

3 " those who care about literature and mind must know the Hebrew Bible, Donne, Sterne and Jane Austen, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Proust and Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and (of course) Shakespeare, to start. "

― David Gelernter , The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness

4 " superb group of mind-mindful novelists at work today: Philip Roth and Martin Amis, Cynthia Ozick, Jenny Erpenbeck, John Banville, V. S. Naipaul, and J. M. Coetzee—to start. "

― David Gelernter , The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness

5 " The stronger your grasp of every second of your life, including the paradoxical experience at the bottom of the spectrum, the stronger you are. "

― David Gelernter , The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness

6 " Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experience of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue. . . . All these have a distinct experienced quality. . . . To put it another way, we can say that a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel—an associated quality of experience.11 "

― David Gelernter , The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness

7 " Experience is a body of memories we use (on purpose or implicitly) to guide us. But we don’t experience an event merely by living through it. To experience an event, we must live through and remember it. "

― David Gelernter , The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness