Neuroscience Philosophy Quotes

Vulnerability is the least celebrated emotion in our society

I don't trust anybody who isn't a little bit neurotic

I take it as a compliment when somebody calls me crazy. I would be offended if I was one of the sheeple, one of the sleepwalkers in the matrix or part of the collective hallucination we call 'normal

Life is a useless passion, an exciting journey of a mammal in survival mode. Each day is a miracle, a blessing unexplored and the more you immerse yourself in light, the less you will feel the darkness. There is more to life than nothingness. And cynicism. And nihilism. And selfishness. And glorious isolation. Be selfish with yourself, but live your life through your immortal acts, acts that engrain your legacy onto humanity. Transcend your fears and follow yourself into the void instead of letting yourself get eaten up by entropy and decay. Freedom is being yourself without permission. Be soft and leave a lasting impression on everybody you meet

I am a habitual rule-breaker

I have been at war with parts of myself for so long

You are not always right. It’s not always about being right. The best thing you can offer others is understanding. Being an active listener is about more than just listening, it is about reciprocating and being receptive to somebody else. Everybody has woes. Nobody is safe from pain. However, we all suffer in different ways. So learn to adapt to each person, know your audience and reserve yourself for people who have earned the depths of you

To construct is the essence of vision. Dispense with construction and you dispense with vision. Everything you experience by sight is your construction.

Your fear of becoming a cliche is what turns you into one. If you remove the fear, we are all really walking contradictions, hypocrites and paradoxical cliches

Now I have to say I'm a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it's a natural fact of life.

a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.

The human has not one but two births – first, when a person is born from the mother’s womb, and second, when that person rises from the socio-culturally imposed cocoon of prejudices and ignorance.

Much like addictive drugs, power uses ready-made reward circuitries in the brain, producing extreme pleasure.

In truth, there is no such thing as an “intuitive boundary” of a sensory state. That most philosophers take such states as brain-bound is not an intuition, but a prejudice.

It is through the erosion of memory that time heals all wounds.

The central idea of this book is that the self is a process, not a thing or an entity. The self isn’t something outside experience, hidden either in the brain or in some immaterial realm.

Self-consciousness is, from a naturalistic point of view (in this case neurobiological), not more than a degree of sophistication of neural processes. The emergence of self-conscious states is not a drastic, extravagant, earth-shaking phenomenon.

Mother Nature created God as a neurological anti-depressant sentiment, but Man tore that God apart into pieces and made citadels of differentiation out of them.

​Everything that makes you, you, is a biologically existential expression of your entire brain.

Morality does not come from a book, it comes from the human mind.

the grasping mind cannot grasp its ultimate inability to grasp; it can only cultivate its tolerance of that inability.

We gain from the new science of mind not only insights into ourselves - how we perceive, learn, remember, feel, believe and act - but also a new perspective of ourselves and our fellow human beings in the context of biological evolution.

The waking world isn't outside and separate from our mind. It's brought forth and enacted through our imaginative perception of it.

The lessons of relationship that our primordial ancestors learned are deeply encoded in the genetics of our neurobiological circuits of love. They are present from the moment we are born and activated at puberty by the cocktail of neurochemicals. It’s an elegant synchronized system. At first our brain weighs a potential partner, and if the person fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It’s the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding.

We only experience a fraction of the reality we are a part of. What if we turn our eyes toward the interior of reality? Is it possible that the interior follows the patterns of the exterior? Might our state of consciousness reflect only a fraction of what may be potentially experienced?

The brain, having never taken a course in philosophy, is the ultimate pragmatist; what is true is what works. Like any successful oddsmaker, the brain is a predictor of probabilities, not a stickler for the perfect answer.

It has been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn’t made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain!

Mystics would tell you, you are not your body - materialists would tell you, you are only your body - whereas the existential fact of human life is that, you are not your body - you are not your mind - you are nothing - for there is nothing constant about you at any given moment that you can say that you are that - your mind is constantly changing - your body is constantly changing - you as a bio-psychological creature are constantly evolving - if there is anything that's constant about you, it's change itself - therefore, what you really are, is an eternal force of change.

Literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.

The human mind has a primordial affinity towards ideas of miracles and mysticism, especially, in times of weakness.

Fundamentalism not only fuels devastating acts of violence, but also all kinds of primitive prejudicial behaviors, such as Misogyny, Polygamy, Homophobia, and Islamophobia.

Morality does not come to this mortal world from some imaginary paradise. It rises from the neurons of mortal humans.

Our entire neurobiology acts as a giant input-output system, that receives information from the outside world, processes that information and makes a person react accordingly.

Believing in a non-existent unconscious simply reveals the not knowing about how the mind and our memory fundamentally works or who we really are.

OM is the sound of brahman, the nondual source and basis of the phenomenal universe that’s also identical to the transcendent self, ātman.

The world needs psychological singularity, that is oneness among humans, not some pompous biotechnological singularity.

Anyone who utters “salvation only through Christ” inadvertently commits to the greatest blasphemy of all, which is differentiation, and this in turn diminishes the very essence of the title Christian.

The primary purpose of this work is to briefly review the philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, and methodological frameworks that have been developed throughout the history of the West . . .

Even though the world hails Joan of Arc as some sort of hero, which she undoubtedly was, what pains me the most is that her pathological condition ultimately led to her demise at the age of only nineteen.

Neuroscientists rarely have to grapple with the issue of presentism versus existentialism. But in practice, neuroscientists are implicitly presentists. They view the past, present, and future as fundamentally distinct, as the brain makes decisions in the present, based on the memories of the past, to enhance our well being in the future. But despite its intuitive appeal, presentism is the underdog theory in physics and philosophy.

The reason I said earlier that the mind is neither the Cartesian, highly intellectualized, cranium-confined firm-and-frozen ego, nor the self-effaced, world-immersed, flowing, field-like non-thingy occurrence, is that even though I was feeling my limbs to be alien to myself, that did not mean that I felt them to be disconnected. Rather, they were intimately connected, yet, merely connected to me, and not phenomenologically proper parts of myself. The mind-world boundary seems to have moved from the skin/environment junction to the innervated/denervated junction within the body. So part of the body has become external to the mind, or ‘de-minded’.

Humans perceive the world as subjects, yet we are also objects composed of the same material that we are perceiving from. Our attempts to sense the reality hidden behind veils, is very much like a game of hide and seek.

Where do the behavioral-cognitive concepts that contemporary cognitive neuroscience operates with come from? The answer is from Aristotle and his heart-centered philosophy, not brain mechanisms. Aristotle’s terms were adopted by the Christian philosophers and were extensively used by both Descartes and the British empiricists John Locke and David Hume. To their credit, they used many of the cognitive expressions only as hypothetical constructs.

English is my second language, My first language is love. Neuroscience is my second sense, My first sense is love. Theology is my second faith, My first faith is interfaith. Philosophy is my second nature, My first nature is to assimilate.

The moment, you begin to think without any sort of predominant conformity whatsoever, simply to be the act of thinking, that is the moment when answers of real glory and progressive significance begin to manifest in front of your mortal eyes.

It's better not to hold your feelings inside too much and express them to a dear one freely, than to pay thousands of dollars to a psychiatrist for the same outburst of emotions later. Emotions are a bonding mechanism for humans. So, use ‘em, abuse ‘em and utilize ‘em.

Concentration is the ability of the mind to focus exclusively or single-pointedly on the object; mindfulness is the ability to keep the object in focus without forgetting or floating away from it. Concentration differs from attention because it involves not just attending to an object but also sustaining that attention over time. Similarly, mindfulness involves more than attention because it retains the object in awareness from moment to moment, repeatedly bringing it back to mind and preventing it from slipping away in forgetfulness.

The science of Chaos teaches us that everything is interconnected, but the contemporary developments in neuroscience, getting started with the brain neurons and their multiple connections, reveal the topology of the brain, a miniature of the universal geometry of everything.

The philosopher has a duty,... in reading scientific texts, to combine semantic tolerance with semantic criticism—to accept in practice what he denounces as a matter of principle, namely, the confusions that result from illegitimately converting correlations into identifications.

If we are to presuppose that the universe is inherently material, that we are emergent organisms from this universe and by nature we seek and generate meaning, meaning itself becomes a substructure of the universe. To think otherwise is to dissociate ourself from the universe, which contradicts the latter belief

Current research in any field of Science has not yet reached the point where we could start exploring the existential question regarding God as a Supreme Entity driving causality in the universe. However, as modern Neuroscience progresses further and gets more advanced, we shall get to dive deeper into the physiological processes underneath the Qualia of God in human mind. What we have seen so far through our studies in Neurotheology, is that it is not God himself/herself/itself, rather it is people’s perception of God that influences the human life. The Qualia of God impact all aspects of human life by altering the body chemistry at a cellular level.

By nature, that mind is easily fooled by supernatural mysticism. It is extremely gullible. And no matter how much we the civilized human beings advance in the fields of modern sciences, there is always a part of us, that tries to allure us with magical nonsense, because that nonsense has been with us since the birth of humanity.

Current research in any field of Science has not yet reached the point where we could start exploring the existential question regarding God as a Supreme Entity driving causality in the universe. However, as modern Neuroscience progresses further and gets more advanced, we shall get to dive deeper into the physiological processes underneath the Qualia of God in human mind.

How do we learn? Is there a better way? What can we predict? Can we trust what we’ve learned? Rival schools of thought within machine learning have very different answers to these questions. The main ones are five in number, and we’ll devote a chapter to each. Symbolists view learning as the inverse of deduction and take ideas from philosophy, psychology, and logic. Connectionists reverse engineer the brain and are inspired by neuroscience and physics. Evolutionaries simulate evolution on the computer and draw on genetics and evolutionary biology. Bayesians believe learning is a form of probabilistic inference and have their roots in statistics. Analogizers learn by extrapolating from similarity judgments and are influenced by psychology and mathematical optimization.

Philosophy is the discipline of human thought that allows us to interpret our experience of ourselves and of the world at large, thereby giving meaning to our existence. While science constructs models of reality that predict the behavior of matter and energy, philosophy asks how those models relate to our condition as conscious entities. Without philosophy, science is merely an enabler of technology; it tells us nothing about the underlying nature of nature.

Now you know that the fascinating phenomenon of love has nothing to do with the supernatural entity known as Cupid, but everything to do with neurochemistry. Likewise, divinity is a cerebral creation, not a supernatural one. And it has been long since thinking humanity has learnt that love is a majestic creation of the brain, yet that knowledge hasn’t made love be deemed any less glorious. Then why should it threaten the religious believer to learn that divinity as well is a natural creation of the brain!

Most of Jesus’ life is told through the four Gospels of the New Testament, known as the Canonical gospels, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are not biographies in the modern sense but accounts with allegorical intent. They are written to engender faith in Jesus as the Messiah and the incarnation of God, and not to provide factual data about Jesus’s life. This left the door of exaggeration open. And through that door all kinds of mystical non-sense crept in and made place right alongside the good philosophical teachings of Jesus.

It is much easier to concentrate the mind on external things, than to concentrate on the mind itself. For example, a Neuroscientist can be the smartest man (or woman) on earth in his understanding of the human mind. He may know all the neurochemical changes underlying an outrageous behavior of a person. But when he gets mad himself, very little of his own scientific intellect would actually come in handy for him to control his rage. The virtue of self-control is a skill, which requires practice, regardless of all the neurobiological expertise in the world.

At a cellular level of the human mind, Islamophobia is not really a matter of social stigma, rather it is a natural biological fear response of the general human mind, conditioned through countless pairings between terrorist attacks (unconditioned stimulus) and their apparent association with Islam (conditioned stimulus). Hence, Islamophobia cannot be eradicated completely, unless that pairing is severed and thereafter the conditioned stimulus of Islam is paired with something optimistic such as the heartwarming works of the 13th century Persian Muslim poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi.

Today’s neuroscience is full of subjective explanations that often rephrase but do not really expound the roots of a problem. As I tried to uncover the origins of widely used neuroscience terms, I traveled deeper and deeper into the history of thinking about the mind and the brain. Most of the terms that form the basis of today’s cognitive neuroscience were constructed long before we knew anything about the brain, yet we somehow have never questioned their validity. As a result, human-concocted terms continue to influence modern research on brain mechanisms. I have not sought disagreement for its own sake; instead, I came slowly and reluctantly to the realization that the general practice in large areas of neuroscience follows a misguided philosophy.

More and more people will start telling themselves: "I don't understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I've seen through the game. The most efficient strategy will be to go on pretending I'm a conservative, old-fashioned believer in moral values.

Quantum Mechanics can indeed be extremely complex to grasp, but when we talk about Consciousness, with decades of rigorous studies on the human brain we have realized that actually, there is no other phenomenon in the entire universe that is simpler than the majestic phenomenon of Consciousness. 'If you think you have a solution to the problem of consciousness, you haven’t understood the problem.' This age-old metaphysical and philosophical argument is strictly not true. If you are sufficiently clear-sighted enough, you can realize the problem itself was a matter of the past when we didn’t have insight into the neurological basis of consciousness. And today it is common knowledge in Neuroscience that, all mesmerizing features of the Human Mind, including the glorious Human Consciousness, are born from the tiny specks of jelly inside your head.

I don’t believe it too harsh to say that the history of philosophy when boiled down consists mostly of failed models of the brain. A few of the modern neurophilosophers such as Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett have made a splendid effort to interpret the findings of neuroscience research as these become available. They have helped others to understand, for example, the ancillary nature of morality and rational thought. Others, especially those of poststructuralist bent, are more retrograde. They doubt that the “reductionist” or “objectivist” program of the brain researchers will ever succeed in explaining the core of consciousness. Even if it has a material basis, subjectivity in this view is beyond the reach of science. To make their argument, the mysterians (as they are sometimes called) point to the qualia, the subtle, almost inexpressible feelings we experience about sensory input. For example, “red” we know from physics, but what are the deeper sensations of “redness”? So what can the scientists ever hope to tell us in larger scale about free will, or about the soul, which for religious thinkers at least is the ultimate of ineffability?

What is the world for if not to evoke and reflect back to us, as mirror, the obfuscated aspects of ourselves?

Lost and afraid in a crowd of our own alienated facets turned other, we create a cultural narrative of pure projection to try to impose some order onto the chaos

From this ground zero, a modern meaning movement began to rise, eventually growing to include philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. If the symptoms of meaninglessness were alienation and emptiness, the balm was fulfillment and personal sense-making. The “central concept of human psychology is meaning,” wrote Jerome Bruner. And the central task of every individual is to make your own meaning. There is no single formula. But

Jung was interested in what human beings could become in potential, which formed the foundation for his analytic psychology.

In this altered state, the parts of the brain associated with happiness, compassion, and equanimity light up. Kotler and Wheal describe four experiential characteristics of these ecstatic states. They are: Selflessness Timelessness Effortlessness Richness 2.9. The Enlightenment Circuit associated with Bliss Brain. Brain regions include those involved with attention (insula and anterior cingulate cortex), regulating stress and the DMN (ventromedial prefrontal cortex and limbic system), empathy (temporoparietal junction, anterior cingulate cortex, and insula), and regulating self-awareness (precuneus and medial prefrontal cortex). They summarize these four qualities with the acronym STER. The benefit of this characterization of altered states is that it’s not linked to a philosophy, religion, guru, or cult. It focuses on the experiences common to transcendent states, rather than the paths by which people reach them. Selflessness represents a letting go of the sense of I-me-mine and all the elements that keep us stuck in our suffering default local personalities. Timelessness means coming into the present moment. That’s the place where we’re free of the regrets of the past as well as worries about the future. We’re in the timeless now, the only place we can experience the state of flow. In Huxley’s words, “the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood,” while “Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.” In this place, we relax into a sense of effortlessness. We feel connected to the universe and all living beings, our lives infused with a sense of richness. In this state we make connections between ideas, and the coordination between all the parts of our brains is enhanced. These rich experiences feel deeply significant. Kotler and Wheal document the human drive for ecstasy as far back in time as the ancient Greeks, saying that Plato describes it as “an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence.” Our English word “ecstasy” comes from the Greek words ex and stasis. It means getting outside (ex) the static place where your consciousness usually stands (stasis). That’s Bliss Brain. When you quiet the demon, you open up space in consciousness for connection with the universe. This produces a rich experience in which time, space, and effort fall away, and you merge with the rich infinity of nonlocal mind.

The dream of Strong Artificial Intelligence—and more specifically the growing interest in the idea that a computer can become conscious and have first-person subjective experiences—has led to a cultural shift. Prophets like Kurzweil believe that we are much closer to cyberconsciousness and superintelligence than most observers acknowledge, while skeptics argue that current AI systems are still extremely primitive and that hopes of conscious machines are pipedreams. Who is right? This book does not attempt to address this question, but points out some philosophical problems and asks some philosophical questions about machine consciousness. One fundamental problem is that we do not understand human consciousness. Many in science and artificial intelligence assume that human consciousness is based on information or computations. Several writers have tried to tackle this assumption, most notably the British physicist Roger Penrose, whose controversial theory suggests that consciousness is based upon noncomputable quantum states in some of the tiniest structures in the brain, called microtubules. Other, perhaps less esoteric thinkers, like Duke’s Miguel Nicolelis and Harvard’s Leonid Perlovsky, are beginning to challenge the idea that the brain is computable. These scientists lead their fields in man-machine interfacing and computer science. The assumption of a computable brain allows artificial intelligence researchers to believe they will create artificial minds. However, despite assuming that the brain is a computational system—what philosopher Riccardo Manzotti calls “the computational stance”—neuroscience is still discovering that human consciousness is nothing like we think it is. For me this is where LSD enters the picture. It turns out that human consciousness is likely itself a form of hallucination. As I have said, it is a very useful hallucination, but a hallucination nonetheless. LSD and psychedelics may help reveal our normal everyday experience for the hallucination that it is. This insight has been argued about for centuries in philosophy in various forms. Immanuel Kant may have been first to articulate it in modern form when he called our perception of the world “synthetic.” The fundamental idea is that we do not have direct knowledge of the external world. This idea will be repeated often in this book, and you will have to get used to it. We only have knowledge of our brain’s creation of that world for us. In other words, what we see, hear, and subsequently think are like movies that our brain plays for us after the fact. These movies are based on perceptions that come into our senses from the external world, but they are still fictions of our brain’s creation. In fact, you might put the disclaimer “based on a true story” in front of each experience you have. I do not wish to imply that I believe in the homunculus argument—what philosopher Daniel Dennett describes as the “Cartesian Theater”—the hypothetical place in the mind where the self becomes aware of the world. I only wish to employ the metaphor to illustrate the idea that there is no direct relationship between the external world and your perception of it.

Mind, body, spirit, they might sound three, but they are actually one, to fathom it you gotta unlearn, all your inclinations of duality.

An excess of delta in the frontal region of the brain during a waking state could result in the experience of mental fog or fatigue. An excess of delta in the frontal area can also result in chronic pain such as fibromyalgia.

The lines between neuroscience, philosophy, poetry, theology and sociology do not exist in my works. Divisions exist only in the world of amateurs - the deeper you go in mind, the more undivided you become, until you finally realize, it's all one.

Even a most detailed temporary snapshot of our brains will not magically make us alive again when it is run as a software version on a computer that operates an artificial robot body.

If we really were only a hallucinating user illusion, a conscious mind that has nothing to say and can only observe the machinations of the subconscious mind, both supposedly being the creations of the brain, why would we want to transfer the brain's illusions anyway?

The same mental health experts also say that we should “fake it until you make it.” It is one of their attempts to reprogram what does not exist, to foolishly fool a supposedly foolish unconscious or subconscious mind.

Despite their complete lack of knowledge and understanding about the very basics of consciousness, Machine Man still insists with a religious fervor that is cloaked in the mantle of science that consciousness can only arise out of particles that have no consciousness.

As evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience converge, more and more the scientific findings align with the most basic ethical teaching of the most enduring systems of belief, what we call the Golden Rule. It may be that variations on the command "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" appear in so many different traditions-from the Tao of ancient China, to the law of Moses, to the Sermon on the Mount, to the coldly rational philosophy of Emmanuel Kant-because that command was, in a sense, written by the hand of natural selection.

Dualism is the idea that mind and matter are completely different domains of reality. Mind is subjective, nonphysical, ethereal consciousness-related stuff, and matter is objective, hard physical stuff. This insight was promoted by French philosopher René Descartes. It exists in a slightly different form as Sankhya philosophy, which is regarded by many Indian scholars as the philosophical basis of yoga. In Sankhya there are two fundamental aspects of reality: prakrti and purusa. Prakrti is the evolving, changeable physical world familiar to science, whereas purusa is permanent, unchanging, pure consciousness-as-such. Unlike Descartes’s version of dualism, Sankhya maintains a tripartite model: matter, mind, and pure consciousness. Both matter and mind are considered prakrti, or part of the physical world. This is similar to the models developed by the modern neurosciences—the mind is a brain-mediated information processing machine. But the mind also enjoys awareness and consciousness. Thus in Sankhya philosophy the mind is the missing link between inanimate matter and conscious awareness. It is inseparably both at the same time. Yoga seeks to purify that link so the relationship between the physical world and consciousness becomes clearer. In the process of clarification, the undistracted mind begins to see the true relationships between matter and consciousness, and as a side effect of that insight, the siddhis arise. When the link is completely clear, enlightenment is said to occur. That’s the whole story of yoga in a nutshell. The problem with both dualistic or tripartite philosophies is this: How can radically different domains interact at all? This is why philosopher Christian De Quincey calls dualism a miracle. At least within Sankhya the mind is regarded as consisting of both matter and consciousness, but that too doesn’t cleanly solve the interaction problem. The next major idea about mind and matter is materialism, which asserts that everything that exists, including mind and consciousness, consists of matter and energy. This is the dominant philosophy of science today, and it asserts that there is nothing special about consciousness because it is simply due to activity in the brain. The problem with materialism is that no one has any (good) idea how the mindless physical brain can give rise to subjective experience. This impasse has led some philosophers to sidestep the problem by simply denying that subjective experience exists. Within that rather odd view, we’re all just zombies.

Why should or how could any of our thoughts be real or beliefs be true if they really were the mere product of inexplicable and mostly random movements of atoms in our brains?

In poetry I am sufi, In philosophy I am advaitin. In duty I am scientist, In existence I am human.

We are neither just nothing nor absolutely everything despite prevailing science and philosophies saying so.

Machine Man faithfully believes that a conscious intelligent mind came from unconscious dumb matter, by sheer luck and for no reason or purpose.

The idea of cold, unbiased, ‘mathematical’ rationality, while long celebrated in many schools of philosophy, is not backed by neuroscience.

In contrast, the Indian and Tibetan yogic traditions claim to provide detailed accounts of the transformations of consciousness during the dying process. Tibetan Buddhism, in particular, as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, offers a rich contemplative perspective on death, including meditations to prepare for death and to practice as one dies. This kind of experiential view of dying and death is missing from the biomedical perspective. Nevertheless, we might wonder exactly how these yogic traditions, rooted in foreign cultures and belief systems, can help us to recover an experiential approach to death in our modern Western context.

Transdisciplinary endeavours such as Neuro-Techno-Philosophy can teach us a lot about human frailty and malleability. By understanding our neurochemical motivations, neurobehavioural needs, fears and predilections, and the neuropsychological foundations underpinning the behaviour of states, we are better placed to navigate the challenges posed by contemporary geopolitics and global security.

Deeper integration of technology within the body, as well as the use of neuro-technological and neuropharmacological means of enhancing our bodies could affect how we feel and think – and therefore also how we act on the battlefield. While enhancement may boost cognitive and physical capabilities, they also diminish some deeply human features like compassion and empathy, that have been pivotal to us as a species, both for survival and cooperation.

Transdisciplinary insights could bolster conflict resolution efforts, which often incorporate behavioural models but rarely include neuroscientific insights.

Truth, independent of the Self, is irrelevant to the biological existence of human life.

In the society of thinking humanity, the natural law of trust should be - In I, I trust.

God is nature’s anti-dote to misery.

I am simply the expression of Neuroscience itself.

I am very much aware of the fact that there would come people who would attempt to proclaim me being a reincarnation of various sages and monks. But mind you, o conscientious soul, soul doesn’t travel through time, only ideas do, for glorious ideas seek out various vessels through time and inspire the whole world by shaping their psyche, over and over.

Almost every single intellectual has been obsessed with an illustrious question - what drives morality! Yet none of them has been able to find an actual answer to this question. All that they have done is to publish tons of reading material full with theories and intellectual speculations. The truth is, morality is not driven by anything, it is the one thing that drives everything else. Morality is the fundamental drive of being a civilized conscientious human, that rises through self-awareness and self-regulation.

Pathology can indeed evoke experiences of Absolute Godliness, but not all God experiences are caused by pathology. They can also occur due to disturbance in the geomagnetic field of our planet, consumption of psychedelics, excruciatingly extreme level of stress during a near- death situation, or ultimately through a natural and healthy procedure of meditation or/and prayer.

When phobia starts to build up in the psyche of thinking humanity against a part of its own kind, there is nothing more primordial and gruesome than that, especially when we are talking about a species that is supposedly the most intelligent one on Earth. Phobias recorded in DSM do not make a person lesser human, but Islamophobia does indeed define whether a person is really a thinking and sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman.

A person may hold his own beliefs and creeds to be dearest, and nourish them with all his might, but the moment he starts preaching the exclusive greatness and dominance over all other systems of beliefs and creeds, the world begins to plunge into a death trap.

The one ultimate rule of the Quranic fundamentalists is “there is one God and Mohammed is his prophet”. Everything beyond that not only is bad, but must be destroyed forthwith. At moment’s notice, every man or woman, who does not exactly believe in that, must be killed.... This is not religion my friend. This is primitiveness at its worst.

Why should a religion claim that it is not bound to abide by the standpoint of reason! If one does not take the standard of reason, there cannot be any true judgment, even in the case of religion.

The more a person is united within himself or herself and inwardly simple, the more and higher things he or she understands, because he or she receives the light of understanding from within.

The Self is the measure of everything.