Philosophers Are Never Quite Sure What They

There Is A Time For Politeness And There Is A Time When You Are Obliged To Be Rude.

If You Can Approach The World's Complexities, Both Its Glories And Its Horrors, With An Attitude Of Humble Curiosity, Acknowledging That However Deeply You Have Seen, You Have Only Scratched The Surface, You Will Find Worlds Within Worlds, Beauties You Could Not Heretofore Imagine, And Your Own Mundane Preoccupations Will Shrink To Proper Size, Not All That Important In The Greater Scheme Of Things.

If The Best The Roboticists Can Hope For Is The Creation Of Some Crude, Cheesy, Second-rate, Artificial Consciousness, They Still Win.

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.

Imagination Is Cheap As Long As You Don't Have To Worry About The Details.