Hence the frequently cited metaphor of the history of life on Earth, in which human civilization occupies only the final ‘second’ of the ‘day’ during which life has so far existed, is misleading. In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun. The whole of biological

What we could do, though, is have a conversation ranging over a diverse range of topics, and pay attention to whether the program’s utterances were or were not adapted, in their meanings, to the various purposes that came up.

when the Black Death plague destabilized the static societies of Europe in the fourteenth century, the new ideas for plague-prevention that spread best were extremely bad ones.

Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.’ But that cannot be so. For if the ‘capacity’ in question is mere computational speed and amount of memory, then we can understand the aspects in question with the help of computers

At any rate, although from our perspective Archimedes’ system repeatedly ‘tried’ to jump to universality, he apparently did not want it to.

generic feature of experimentation is that the bigger the errors you make, either in the numbers or in your naming and interpretation of the measured quantities, the more exciting the results are, if true.

Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke set out to free political institutions from arbitrary rules and assumptions.

It is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds. One is a parochial kind of attractiveness, local to a species, to a culture or to an individual. The other is unrelated to any of those: it is universal, and as objective as the laws of physics. Creating either kind of beauty requires knowledge; but the second kind requires knowledge with uni