Thursday, November 26, 2009

It all boils down to this!

File:Qualia of colour.jpg


"Nothing is more chastening to human vanity than the realization that the richness of our mental life — all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, even what we regard as our intimate self—arises exclusively from the activity of little wisps of protoplasm in the brain."

Quoted by - Vilayanur. S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein , Brain and Perception Laboratory, 0109, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA
In - "Three Laws of Qualia - What Neurology Tells Us about the Biological Functions of Consciousness, Qualia and the Self"
From - "Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4, No. 5-6, 1997, pp. 429–58"

(Qualia are the ‘raw feels’ of conscious experience: the painfulness of pain, the redness of red. Qualia give human conscious experience the particular character that it has. For instance, imagine a red square; that conscious experience has (at least) two qualia: a colour quale, responsible for your sensation of redness, and a shape quale, responsible for the square appearance of the imagined object.)

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