Philosophy Quotes

"The environment is not something outside us; it is us, evolved and embodied."

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind."

"Philosophy without action is mere conversation."

"We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relations of man to man. What is our relationship to the earth itself?"

"Our approach to nature is to ask, what can we extract from it, rather than to ask what wisdom it contains."

"To truly change the world, we must change the way we think about our relationship to it."

"There is a kind of power in understanding that we are not masters of nature but participants in it."

"I had heard of instinct, and I had observed that animals had it, but I had not observed that men had it."

"The life of an individual is interesting mainly at those points where principles meet and have a bearing on conduct."

"Every day of our lives we are paying the price for one thing or another."

"Whether we like it or not, we are moving toward a single world culture."

"Every system has entropy; the question is whether you fight it or accept it."

"Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about."

"The humble pea plant teaches lessons greater than any philosopher."

"Philosophy without observation is mere fancy; observation without thought is mere collection."

"I do not believe in competitors but in complements."

"Philosophy without observation is merely empty speculation."

"Computing machinery and intelligence."

"It seems to me that only a very narrow orthodoxy would deny that consciousness is possible in a machine."

"As soon as one accepts the Turing test as a viable measure of intelligence, one is committed to a very particular view of the mind."

"May I say that if the definition which I have given is accepted, the question 'Do machines think?' is equivalent to 'Are there imaginative digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?'"

"A human has a 'soul' in the psychological sense, which is a collection of behaviors and attributes that define personality."

"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that the conversation was with another human."

"I would say that a system is thinking if we cannot reasonably deny it the possibility of thought."

"We are not concerned with the fact that the computer has a head, or with the fact that it lacks a skull."

"One might say that the sense in which we are speaking of 'thinking' is a very particular one, and when we call any machine a 'thinking machine' we are using 'thinking' in this sense."

"Can a machine pretend to be a man? If not, why not?"

"Whether a machine can actually think is more a matter of convention than of actual fact."

"I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live."

"Life is what you make of it."