One cannot learn all about what it’s like to run a marathon by interviewing only those who drop out—but one can learn something.
No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
It’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s not an academic pursuit—it sort of masquerades as one, but at its core it’s a test of trust in each other. Are you or aren’t you one of us? And woe to the one w...
It is not scientism to concede the objectivity and precision of good science, any more than it is history worship to concede that Napoleon did once rule in’ France and the Holocaust actually happened....
I didn’t plan to become an atheist. I didn’t even want to become an atheist. It’s just that I had no choice. If I’m being honest with myself.
But as Descartes observed, even an infinitely powerful evil demon couldn’t trick him into thinking he himself existed if he didn’t exist: cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am.
[...] нормалното положение на нещата за всяка живо същество, което се размножава, е такова, че при всяко поколение се ражда по-многобройно потомство, отколкото е възможно да се възпроизведе. Иначе каз...
You can’t change your beliefs as an act of will, in the way you can decide to improve your skills with chainsaw or keyboard.
This is natural selection, plain as day: the islanders have a simple rule: if it returns from the sea intact, copy it! They may have considerable comprehension of the principles of naval architecture...
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.—Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995
Not all historians of philosophy have the same goals and attitudes, and I for one see no good reason for disqualifying any of the contenders. Some insist on placing their thinkers in the historical co...
It turns out that all the magic of cognition depends, just as life itself does, on cycles within cycles of recurrent, re-entrant, reflexive information-transformation processes
Isn't it true that whatever isn't determined by our genes must be determined by our environment? What else is there? There's Nature and there's Nurture. Is there also some X, some further contributor...
Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion. —Steven Weinberg, 1999
Carpenters don’t make their saws and hammers, tailors don’t make their scissors and needles, and plumbers don’t make their wrenches, but blacksmiths can make their hammers, tongs, anvils, and chisels
As the comedian Emo Phillips once said, When I was a child, I used to pray to God for a bicycle. But then I realized that God doesn’t work in that way—so I stole a bike and prayed for forgiveness!
As Dawkins goes on to say (p. 316), The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity. This is one of the key stre...
F you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the s...
Determinism, the idea that the facts at one moment in time—the location, mass, direction, and velocity of every particle—determine what happens in the next moment, and so on, forever.
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...