What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.

Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know.

Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

An ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.

What would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must look truly horrible: the sight of furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thorax heaving in frenzied contortions.

Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.