From Bacteria to Bach and Back

So let’s consider, as a tentative proposal, defining semantic information as design worth getting, and let’s leave the term “design” as noncommittal as possible for the time being, allowing only for the point I stressed in chapter 3, that design without a designer (in the sense of an intelligent designer) is a real and important category. Design al

To summarize, animals, plants, and even microorganisms are equipped with competences that permit them to deal appropriately with the affordances of their environments. There are free-floating rationales for all these competences, but the organisms need not appreciate or comprehend them to benefit from them, nor do they need to be conscious of them.

In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), I argued that natural selection is an algorithmic process, a collection of sorting algorithms that are themselves composed of generate-and-test algorithms that exploit randomness (pseudo-randomness, chaos) in the generation phase, and some sort of mindless quality-control testing phase, with the winners advancing

a fortuitously “good” mutation almost never happens. But evolution depends on those rarest of rare events.

Can your children read road maps as easily as you do or have they become dependent on GPS to guide them? How concerned should we be that we are dumbing ourselves down by our growing reliance on intelligent machines?

Here is Turing’s strange inversion, put in language borrowed from Beverley: IN ORDER TO BE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL COMPUTING MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW WHAT ARITHMETIC IS.

the concept of information we use in cognitive science is semantic information, that is, information identified as being about something specific: faces, or places, or glucose, for instance.

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

The most influential argument for a dedicated, innate Language Acquisition Device (or LAD) (Chomsky 1965, p. 25) is the “poverty of the stimulus” argument, which claims that a human infant simply doesn’t hear enough grammatical language (and ungrammatical language corrected—trial and error) in the first few years of life to provide the data require