Yet, again, there is something wrong with that scenario. The two adaptations presumably did co-evolve, but the driving force behind that evolution cannot have been that people were improving on ideas and passing the improvements on to their children, because, again, if they had been, they would have been making cumulative improvements on a

Whenever a wide range of variant theories can account equally well for the phenomenon they are trying to explain, there is no reason to prefer one of them over the others, so advocating a particular one in preference to the others is irrational.

The first attribute that Pericles cited was Athens’ democracy. And he explained why. Not because ‘the people should rule’, but because it promotes ‘wise action’. It involves continual discussion, which is a necessary condition for discovering the right answer, which is in turn a necessary condition for progress:

At the present state of the field, a useful rule of thumb is: if it can already be programmed, it has nothing to do with intelligence in Turing’s sense.

We do not just see blue: we see a blue sky up there, far away. We do not just feel pain: we experience a headache, or a stomach ache. The brain attaches those interpretations – ‘head’, ‘stomach’ and ‘up there’ – to events that are in fact within the brain itself. Our sense organs themselves, and all the interpretations that we consciously and

amorphous

conjecture,

Error-correction is the beginning of infinity.

mathematical conjecture can be fruitful in providing explanations even if it remains unproved for centuries, or even if it is unprovable.