Every computer divides itself into its hardware and its software, the machine host to its algorithm, the human being to his mind. It is hardly surprising that men and women have done what computers now do long before computers could do anything at all. The dissociation between mind and matter in men and machines is very striking; it suggests that almost any stable and reliable organization of material objects can execute an algorithm and so come to command some form of intelligence.

Validity is the touchstone of inference, and truth of judgment: the fact that vichyssoise is cold ratifies the judgment that vichyssoise is, indeed, cold, and the judgment that vichyssoise is cold expresses the fact that vichyssoise is cold.

Every computer divides itself into its hardware and its software, the machine host to its algorithm, the human being to his mind. It is hardly surprising that men and women have done what computers now do long before computers could do anything at all. The dissociation between mind and matter in men and machines is very striking; it suggests that almost any stable and reliable organization of material objects can execute an algorithm and so come to command some form of intelligence.

The desire to see and the desire to ratify what one has seen are desires at odds with one another, if only because they proceed from separate places in the imagination.

However good an argument in philosophy may happen to be, it is generally not good enough.

Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental missiles , military space platforms and nuclear weapons? If memory serves it was not the Vatican.

No man is obliged to be what he might have been.