Sublime

We have always tended to think of intelligence as being ‘what humans do’ and also ‘what happens inside our head’.

Conversely, I have settled on a simple test for judging claims, including Dennett’s, to have explained the nature of consciousness (or any other computational task): if you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.

Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett,

The biosphere is utterly saturated with design, with purpose, with reasons. What I call the “design stance” predicts and explains features throughout the living world using the same assumptions that work so well when reverse-engineering artifacts made by (somewhat) intelligent human designers.

It’s not that Krishnamurti saw the mind as anything close to a computer. While a computational functionalist might argue that building a mind is as simple as building a machine, Krishnamurti believed our minds are so much more. But he worried we were selling ourselves short, letting our minds get stuck in mechanical routines like memory and

The field of artificial (general) intelligence has made no progress because there is an unsolved philosophical problem at its heart: we do not understand how creativity works. Once that has been solved, programming it will not be difficult.

While it may seem ridiculous and nonsensical to explain something by resorting to an infinity of turtles all the way down, it actually is much more ridiculous and nonsensical to believe that somewhere down there, there’s a turtle floating in the air. The science of human behavior shows that turtles can’t float; instead, it is indeed turtles all the

The termite castle and Gaudí’s La Sagrada Familia are very similar in shape but utterly different in genesis and construction. There are reasons for the structures and shapes of the termite castle, but they are not represented by any of the termites who constructed it. There is no Architect Termite who planned the structure, nor do any individual