Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be “informavores”, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.
Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.
The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.
An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today.
We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
Reasons for declaring belief is not are not the same as reasons for believing in god.
In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. All the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic and mindless.
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.