If a mosquito has a soul, it is mostly evil. So I don't have too many qualms about putting a mosquito out of its misery. I'm a little more respectful of ants.

No reference is truly direct — every reference depends on some kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is.

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.

We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.

You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.

For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also makes certain things happen on certain dates or in certain places according to whether the number 13 'is involved' or not (whatever 'is involved' might mean).