There are three different but closely related strategies or stances we can adopt when trying to understand, explain, and predict phenomena: the physical stance, the design stance, and the intentional stance (Dennett 1971, 1981, 1983, 1987, and elsewhere).

The way to proceed is clear: start with the minimal specification for a living, reproducing thing—a list of all the things it has to be able to do—and work backward, making an inventory of the available raw materials (often called the feedstock molecules of prebiotic chemistry), and asking what sequence of possible events could gradually bring toge

flotsam is cargo that has inadvertently or accidentally been swept off the deck or out of the hold of a ship, while jetsam is cargo that has been deliberately thrown overboard—jettisoned.

It is the absence of practical reason, of intelligence harnessed to pursue diverse and shifting and self-generated ends, that (currently) distinguishes the truly impressive Watson from ordinary sane people. If and when Watson ever reaches the level of sophistication where it can enter fully into the human practice of reason-giving and reason-evalua

That’s what it is like to be us. We learn about others from hearing or reading what they say to us, and that’s how we learn about ourselves as well. This is not a new idea, but keeps being rediscovered apparently. The great neurologist John Hughlings Jackson once said, “We speak, not only to tell others what we think, but to tell ourselves what we

Survival, in short, depends on information and, moreover, depends on differential or asymmetric information: I know some things that you don’t know, and you know some things that I don’t know, and our well-being depends on keeping it that way.

When you can’t get her name out of your mind, is it always capitalized, or pronounced with a sigh?

creationists ask, rhetorically, “where does all the information in the DNA come from?” and Darwin’s answer is simple: it comes from the gradual, purposeless, nonmiraculous transformation of noise into signal, over billions of years.

Evolution by natural selection starts with how come and arrives at what for.