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

Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!

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

I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?

When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.

Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.

What is intelligence, anyway It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems so elusive: It describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon of our ignorance about how minds might work.