Erwin Schrödinger – Mind and Matter

If we say that instruments may be better at telling us what is, that too is untrue because we make the instruments and read the information from them.  So we come back to this strange state of affairs.  While the direct sensual perception of the phenomenon tells us nothing as to its objective physical nature and has to be discarded from the outset as a source of information, yet the theoretical picture we obtain eventually rests entirely on a complicated array of various information, all obtained by direct sensual perception.  It resides upon them, it is pieced together from them, yet it cannot really be said to contain them.

Sir James Jeans – The Mysterious Universe

Objective realities exist because certain things affect your consciousness and mine in the same way, but we are assuming something we have no right to assume if we label them as …  real ….  The true label is I think mathematical… substantiality [sic] is a purely mental concept measuring the direct effect of objects on our sense of touch.

Erwin Schrödinger – Mind and Matter

The world extended in time and space is but our representation.

The first and greatest miracle is the irruption of another world into our knowledge, an irruption that rends the fabric of our categories and their necessities, of our evidence and their norms.  But it should be understood that the other world in question is one that cannot be perceived by the organ of ordinary knowledge; that it can be neither proven nor disputed by means of ordinary argumentation; that it is a world so different that it can neither be seen nor perceived except by the organ of ‘Hurqalyan’ perception…..

It is the ‘Earth of visions’, the Earth which confers on visionary apperceptions [sic] their truth…….

It is an external world, and yet it is not the physical world.  It is a world that teaches us that it is possible to emerge from measurable space without emerging from extent, and that we must abandon homogeneous chronological time in order to enter that qualitative time which is the history of the soul.

Henri Bergson – Matter and Memory

Now if living beings are, within the universe, just ‘centers of indetermination’, and if the degree of this indetermination is measured by the number and rank of their functions, we can conceive that their mere presence is equivalent to the suppression of all those parts of objects in which their functions find no interest.  They allow to pass through them, so to speak, those external influences which are indifferent to them; the others isolated become ‘perceptions’ by their very isolation.

Rene Descartes – Key Philosophical Writings

… although in approaching fire I feel heat, and in approaching it a little too near I even feel pain, there is at the same time no reason in this which could persuade me that there is in the fire something resembling this heat any more than there is in it something resembling the pain; all that I have any reason to believe from this is that there is something in it, whatever it may be, which excites in me these sensations of heat or pain ...

for I see in this, as in other similar things, that I have been in the habit of perverting the order of nature, because these perceptions of sense having been placed within me by nature merely for the purpose of signifying to my mind what things are beneficial or hurtful to the composite of which it forms a part, and being up to that point sufficiently clear and distinct, I yet avail myself of them as though they were absolute rules by which I might immediately determine the essence of the bodies which are outside me, as to which in fact, they can teach me nothing but what is most obscure and confused.

Arthur Koestler - Janus

Our minds would cease to function if we had to process each of the millions of stimuli which – in William James’s classic phrase – constantly bombard our receptor organs in a ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’.  Thus the nervous system and the brain itself function as a multi-levelled hierarchy of filtering and classifying devices, which eliminate a large proportion of the input as irrelevant noise.

In this filtering process all communication from the sub-conscious – because it is comparatively weak - may be eliminated.  Only by stilling the ‘chattering mind’ – eliminating other sensory input – sight, sound, touch, taste, smell etc can the messages from the sub-conscious be identified

Cyril Burt – Professor of Psychology, University College London, in Psychology and Psychical Research 1968

Our sense organs and our mind operate on an intricate kind of filter which limits and directs the mind’s clairvoyant powers, so that under normal conditions attention is concentrated on just those objects or situations that are of biological importance for the survival of the organism and its species.  As a rule, it would seem, the mind rejects ideas coming from another mind as the body rejects grafts coming from another body.

It is the Spirit of man who sees, hears, feels perfumes, touches and tastes, thinks and acts and has all consciousness. 

Chandogya Upanishad

Know that when the eye looks into space it is the Spirit of man that sees; the eye is only the organ of sight. When one says ‘I feel this perfume’, it is the Spirit that feels; it uses the organ of smell.
When one says ‘I am speaking’, it is the Spirit that speaks; the voice is the organ of speech
When one says ‘I am hearing’, it is the Spirit that hears; the ear is the organ of hearing
And when one says ‘I think’, it is the Spirit that hears; the mind is the organ of thought
It is because of the light of the Spirit that the human mind can see, and can think and enjoy the world

Henri Bergson – Matter and Memory

[a person] would naturally believe that matter exists just as it is perceived; and since it is perceived as an image, the mind would make of it, in itself, an image….

We should astonish him quite as much by telling him that the object is entirely different from that which is perceived in it, that it has neither the colour ascribed to it by the eye, nor the resistance found in it by the hand.  The colours, the resistance, are, for him, in the object; they are not states of our mind; they are part and parcel of an existence really independent of our own.  For common sense then, the object exists in itself and on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it; image it is, but a self-existing image.

From The Doors of Perception - by Aldous Huxley - 1963

…………..Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad,

"that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception.

The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive.

Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful."

According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet.

Sir James Jeans – The Mysterious Universe

The man who does not play chess says:  A piece of white wood, carved to look rather like a horse’s head stuck on a pedestal, was taken from the bottom square next but one to the right hand corner and moved to ….. and so on. 

The chess player says:

“White knight to King’s Bishop 3"