You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either.
Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.
Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He’s redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.
Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.
Within 10 years computers won’t even keep us as pets.
I bet the human brain is a kludge.
The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. That’s why it’s almost always wrong to seek the “real meaning” of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.
We’ll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.
We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake – like putting a fork in one’s eye or using a window instead of a door.
The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.
One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
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.