The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them - especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are.

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.

The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.

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.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.