Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.
An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.
The brain happens to be a meat machine.
Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.
It’s ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute.
Minds are simply what brains do.
General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.
If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.
Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to ‘discover’ that–where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.
In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.
All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints – limitations on space, time, and materials.
Kubrick’s vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke’s is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.
Logic doesn’t apply to the real world.
Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.
What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.
Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!
Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know.
It would be as useless to perceive how things ‘actually look’ as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.
But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does what it is works but what it does when it’s stuck.