What You Can Imagine Depends

Try To Acquire The Weird Practice Of Savoring Your Mistakes, Delighting In Uncovering The Strange Quirks That Led You Astray. Then, When You Have Sucked Out All The Goodness To Be Gained From Having Made Them, You Can Cheerfully Forget Them And Go On To The Next Big Opportunity.

I Have Shown That Those Who Deplore Artificial Intelligence Are Also Those Who Deplore The Evolutionary Accounts Of Human Mentality: If Human Minds Are Non-miraculous Products Of Evolution, Then They Are, In The Requisite Sense, Artifacts, And All Their Powers Must Have An Ultimately Mechanical Explanation. We Are Descended From Macros And Made Of Macros, And Nothing We Can Do Is Beyond The Power Of Huge Assemblies Of Macros.

In Order To Make A Perfect And Beautiful Machine, It Is Not Requisite To Know How To Make It. All The Works Of Human Genius Can Be Understood In The End To Be Products Of A Cascade Of Generate-and-test Procedures That Are, At Bottom, Algorithmic And Mindless.

Postmodernism, The School Of 'thought' That Proclaimed 'there Are No Truths, Only Interpretations' Has Largely Played Itself Out In Absurdity, But It Has Left Behind A Generation Of Academics In The Humanities Disabled By Their Distrust Of The Very Idea Of Truth And Their Disrespect For Evidence, Settling For 'conversations' In Which Nobody Is Wrong And Nothing Can Be Confirmed, Only Asserted With Whatever Style You Can Muster.

If The Best The Roboticists Can Hope For Is The Creation Of Some Crude, Cheesy, Second-rate, Artificial Consciousness, They Still Win.