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

The theoretical fruits of deliberate oversimplification through idealization are not to be denied... Reality in all its messy particularity is too complicated to theorize about, taken straight. The issue is, rather (since every idealization is a strategic choice), which idealizations might really shed some light... which will just land us... diverting fairy tales.

True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.

Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its member to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does!

Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.

I don't think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn't already know about religion. It has long been obvious - even to the deeply religious - that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people.

It's this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what's it made of? It's made of neurons. It's made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation.