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Creation: Life and How to Make It QUOTES

Creation: Life and How to Make It QUOTES

1 " The problem with all fields of research is that people are impatient. It a particular line of enquiry seems to be making progress, we continue down the line, but if it seems to be getting nowhere, we abandon it. This is a problem because the route to the future is often tortuous. Things seems to be moving towards the goal but then unexpectedly snake off in the wrong direction. Initially unproductive approaches can often turn out to be the only ones that lead to the desired destination. "

― , Creation: Life and How to Make It

2 " [Think] of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else could you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Every bit of you has been replaced many times over (which is why you eat, of course). You are not even the same shape as you were then. The point is that you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important. "

― , Creation: Life and How to Make It

3 " Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress "

― , Creation: Life and How to Make It

4 " Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing. "

― , Creation: Life and How to Make It

5 " cause and effect act in webs, not chains. "

― , Creation: Life and How to Make It

6 " Life is not made of atoms,it is merely built out of them. What life is actually 'made of' is cycles of cause and effect, loops of causal flow. These phenomenon are just as real as atoms - perhaps even more real. If anything, the entire universe is actually made from events, of which atoms are merely some of the consequences. "

― , Creation: Life and How to Make It

7 " The poetry of life must not be replaced with matter-of-fact prose. "

― , Creation: Life and How to Make It

8 " Intelligence involves a great deal more than the ability to follow rules ( which is what chess-playing program does). It is also the ability to make up the rules for oneself, when they are needed, or to learn new rules through trial and error. "

― , Creation: Life and How to Make It