True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently – the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs ‘good tricks.’
Go ahead and believe in God, if you like, but don’t imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.
Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.
Imagination is cheap as long as you don’t have to worry about the details.
Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them – if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.
Consciousness is cerebral celebrity – nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and “symptomatic” effects – on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth.
People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children – especially, apparantly, their daughters.
Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.
The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
Atheism, a term which will, I’m sure, eventually become as unnecessary as round-earthism...
If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.
Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its member to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does!
Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.
If nobody cares, then it doesn’t matter what happens to flowers.
Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.