It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD, 1843


All organisms with complex nervous systems are faced with the moment-by-moment question that is posed by life: What shall I do next?
SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH and ROGER LEWIN, Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind 1994

Piaget used to say that intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do (an apt description of my present predicament as I attempt to write about intelligence). If you're good at finding the one right answer to life's multiple-choice questions, you're smart. But there's more to being intelligent a creative aspect, whereby you invent something new "on the fly." Indeed, various answers occur to your brain, some better than others. WILLIAM CALVIN How Brains Think 1996

The apes I know behave every living, breathing moment as though they have minds that are very much like my own. They may not think about as many things, or in the depth that I do, and they may not plan as far ahead as I do. Apes make tools and coordinate their actions during the hunting of prey, such as monkeys. But no ape has been observed to plan far enough ahead to combine the skills of tool construction and hunting for a common purpose. Such activities were a prime factor in the lives of early hominids. These greater skills that I have as a human being are the reason that I am able to construct my own shelter, earn my own salary, and follow written laws. They allow me to behave as a civilized person but they do not mean that I think while apes merely react.
SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH, Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind 1994

It is hard to imagine how a creature without language would think, but one may suspect that a world without any kind of language would in some ways resemble a world without money world in which actual commodities, rather than metal or paper symbols for the value of these, would have to be exchanged. How slow and cumbersome the simplest sale would be, and how impossible the more complex ones! DEREK BICKERTON, Language and Species, 1990

We build mental models that represent significant aspects of our physical and social world, and we manipulate elements of those models when we think, plan, and try to explain events of that world. The ability to construct and manipulate valid models of reality provides humans with our distinctive adaptive advantage; it must be considered one of the crowning achievements of the human intellect.
GORDON H. BOWER and DANIEL G. MORROW, Mental Models in Narrative Comprehension, 1990

Conflicts of representation are painful for a variety of reasons. On a very practical level, it is painful to have a model of reality that conflicts with those of the people around you. The people around you soon make you aware of that. But why should this conflict worry people, if a model is only a model, a best guess at reality that each of us makes? Because nobody thinks of it in that way. If the model is the only reality you can know, then that model is reality, and if there is only one reality, then the possessor of a different model must be wrong.
DEREK BICKERTON, 1990

Only two centuries ago, we could explain everything about everything, out of pure reason, and now most of that elaborate and harmonious structure has come apart before our eyes. We are dumb.... We have discovered how to ask important questions, and now we really do need, as an urgent matter, some answers. We now know that we cannot do this any longer by searching our minds, for there is not enough there to search, nor can we find the truth by guessing at it or by making up stories for ourselves. We cannot stop where we are, stuck with today's level of understanding, nor can we go back. I do not see that we have any real choice in this, for I can see only the one way ahead. We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for hearth and longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.
LEWIS THOMAS, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979

I had another motive in opening this topic, to tell the truth, one that winds its way through almost everything I've done online in the five months since my cancer was diagnosed.

I figured that, like everyone else, my physical self wasn't going to survive forever and I guess I was going to have less time than actuarials allocate us. But if I could reach out and touch everyone I knew on-line . . . I could toss out bits and pieces of my virtual self and the memes that make up Tom Mandel, and then when my body died, I wouldn't really have to leave.... Large chunks of me would also be here, part of this new space.

Not an original idea, but what the hell, worth the try, and maybe one day someone can reconstruct all of the pieces in some sort of mandelbot and I can be arrogant and obstinate and affectionate and compassionate and everything else that you all seem to feel I am. THOMAS F. MANDEL


(All of these quotes were taken from William Calvin's How Brains Think 1996