But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.

We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake — like putting a fork in one's eye or using a window instead of a door.

If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!

But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it is works but what it does when it's stuck.

You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways.