Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
Any theory that makes progress is bound to be initially counterintuitive.
Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors. —Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
A good library has all the good books. A great library has all the books.
Atheists and agnostics can have sacred values, values that are simply not up for re-evaluation at all. I have sacred
Words, I will argue, are the best example of memes, culturally transmitted items that evolve by differential replication—that is, by natural selection.
Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having m...
There is only one way to respect the substance of any purported God-given moral edict: consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God that was p...
The amount of information obtainable in short order by an inquisitive human being is staggeringly large.
Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like Suppose a dog bites a man. They feel obliged instead to say, Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t, thereby demonstrating their unshakable com...
People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, an...
Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection.
It’s just that it would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
But unless dualism or vitalism is true (in which case you have some extra, secret ingredient in you), you are made of robots—or what comes to the same thing, a collection of trillions of macromolecula...
Human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo) than those chimpanzees...
The real danger, I think, is not that machines more intelligent than we are will usurp our role as captains of our destinies, but that we will over-estimate the comprehension of our latest thinking to...
Some philosophical research projects — or problematics, to speak with the more literary types — are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed-upon rules are presupposed — a...
Science properly done is one of the humanities, as a fine physics teacher once said. The point of science is to help us understand what we are and how we got here, and for this we need the great stori...
One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.