Sublime

Yet it is widely believed, especially in the court of public opinion, that a true theory can have no failures and a false theory no successes.

The larger world opened by Athens’s earlier triumphs had destabilized its ancient certainties and now seemed to require a larger order—universal, yet conceptual—within which events could be comprehended. The Sophists’ teachings provided no such order, but rather a method for success.

The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.

“why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.”

Moreover they did not postulate a new man to be produced by the new institutions but accepted as one of their design constraints the psychological characteristics of men and women as they knew them, their selfishness as well as their common sense.

any intelligent creature needs to compute five basic things: where it is, what is happening in the world around it, what it should do right now, how it should implement its plan, and what it should plan to do over the longer term in order to achieve the goals it has been given.