Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking

Figuring out what to credit and what to blame is one of the knottiest problems in AI, and it is also a problem faced by natural selection.

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

Sturgeon’s Law is usually put a little less decorously: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Ninety percent of experiments in molecular biology, 90 percent of poetry, 90 percent of philosophy books, 90 percent of peer-reviewed articles in mathematics—and so forth—is crap.

In a computer model of creativity there should be junk lying around that your creative processes can bump into, noises that your creative processes can’t help overhearing. The spontaneous intrusion of that little noise from the next room may tweak what those processes are doing in a way that is serendipitous, or in a way that is destructive, but ei

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 ranging from the nano-scale biochemical cycles within each neuron, through the generate-and-test cycles of predictive coding in the perceptual systems (see Clark, 2013,

Every increment of design in the universe begins with a moment of serendipity, the undesigned intersection of two trajectories yielding something that turns out, retrospectively, to be more than a mere collision.

Philosophy—in every field of inquiry—is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.

Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them—if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix. Making mistakes is the key to making progress.

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 made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity.