While we tend to conceive of the operations of the mind as unified and transparent, they're actually chaotic and opaque. There's no invisible boss in the brain, no central meaner, no unitary self in command of our activities and utterances. There's no internal spectator of a Cartesian theater in our heads to applaud the march of consciousness across its stage.

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.

I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.

We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.