Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.

We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.

We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence, we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species.

But whether we want to do it because we want to have people to have a different idea of who we are or not, we do it naturally. So the way we construct our narrative is different from the way we constructed it a year ago. The difference is maybe very small or it may be huge.

We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.

There's that effect that is very physical, very down there at the synaptic level, which really means microscopic cellular level, but also molecular level, because all of those structures are operating on an electrochemical basis and so the changes there are very important.