It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.

Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.

It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.

Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.

There's no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) 'Do you realize you've wasted your life?

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.