13 quotes
It's harmful, when naming leads the mind to think that names alone bring meaning close.
The Society of Mind (1987)
The "laws of thought" depend not only on the property of brain cells, but also on how they are connected.
The Society of Mind (1987)
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.
The Society of Mind (1987)
Questions about arts, traits, and styles of life are actually quite technical. They ask us to explain what happens among the agents of our minds.
The Society of Mind (1987)
For generations, scientists and philosophers have tried to explain ordinary reasoning in terms of logical principles — with virtually no success.
The Society of Mind (1987)
We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.
The Society of Mind (1987)
How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.
The Society of Mind (1987)
Unless we can explain the mind in terms of things that have no thoughts or feelings of their own, we'll only have gone around in a circle.
The Society of Mind (1987)
The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. ... It's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks.
The Society of Mind (1988)
Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.
The Society of Mind (1988)
This book... too, is a society — of many small ideas. Each by itself is only common sense, yet when we join enough of them we explain the strangest mysteries of mind.
The Society of Mind (1987)
One's present personality cannot share all the thoughts of one's older personalities — and yet it has some sense that they exist. This is one reason why we feel that we possess an inner Self — a sort of ever-present person-friend, inside the mind, whom we can always ask for help.
The Society of Mind (1987)
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.
The Society of Mind (1987)