If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.

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

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.

In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. All the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic and mindless.

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.