Most People In The West Who Say

Isn't It True That Whatever Isn't Determined By Our Genes Must Be Determined By Our Environment? What Else Is There? There's Nature And There's Nurture. Is There Also Some X, Some Further Contributor To What We Are? There's Chance. Luck. This Extra Ingredient Is Important But Doesn't Have To Come From The Quantum Bowels Of Our Atoms Or From Some Distant Star. It Is All Around Us In The Causeless Coin-flipping Of Our Noisy World, Automatically Filling In The Gaps Of Specification Left Unfixed By Our Genes, And Unfixed By Salient Causes In Our Environment.

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.

The Mind Is The Effect, Not The Cause.

I Have Shown That Those Who Deplore Artificial Intelligence Are Also Those Who Deplore The Evolutionary Accounts Of Human Mentality: If Human Minds Are Non-miraculous Products Of Evolution, Then They Are, In The Requisite Sense, Artifacts, And All Their Powers Must Have An Ultimately Mechanical Explanation. We Are Descended From Macros And Made Of Macros, And Nothing We Can Do Is Beyond The Power Of Huge Assemblies Of Macros.

Human Consciousness Is Just About The Last Surviving Mystery... A Topic That Often Leaves Even The Most Sophisticated Thinkers Tongue-tied And Confused. And, As With All Of The Earlier Mysteries, There Are Many Who Insist - And Hope - That There Will Never Be A Demystification Of Consciousness.