I am less attracted to guesses about what cannot be done, than about making progress on a problem.

I am less attracted to guesses about what cannot be done, than about making progress on a problem.

It seems probable that humans have been on the planet, with much the same brain, for about 250,000 years.

If I want to know how we learn and remember and represent the world, I will go to psychology and neuroscience. If I want to know where values come from, I will go to evolutionary biology and neuroscience and psychology, just as Aristotle and Hume would have, were they alive.

I used to suspect that in the brain, time is its own representation. I now think the problem is so much more complicated. Initially I was rather impressed by the experiments showing that on complex problems, subjects who are distracted do better in getting an answer than either those who answer immediately or those who spend time reflecting on the problem.

Theorizing is of course essential to make progress in understanding, but theorizing in the absence of knowing available relevant facts is not very productive.

Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant.