Perhaps the problem is the seeming need that people have of making black-and-white cutoffs when it comes to certain mysterious phenomena, such as life and consciousness. People seem to want there to be an absolute threshold between the living and the nonliving, and between the thinking and the "merely mechanical," ... But the onward march of science seems to force us ever more clearly into accepting intermediate levels of such properties.

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

You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you' makes more decisions, and so forth, 'round and 'round.

Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.

I am the thought you are now thinking.

Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively few are concerned with or thrilled by the astounding-yet true-facts of science, as put forth in the pages of, say, Scientific American.

I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.