Science Quotes

"The brain is a prediction machine."

"Perception is active, not passive."

"If you want to understand the mind, you must study the brain, but not reduce the mind to mere brain activity."

"Cognitive science requires that we take seriously the computational nature of thought."

"Cognitive impenetrability explains why optical illusions persist even when we know better."

"Natural selection gave us minds, but it didn't tell us what minds are made of."

"Propositional attitudes are not mystical - they're computational states with semantic content."

"Nativism isn't about genes determining every detail; it's about structure enabling learning."

"The mind solves problems by using mental representations that stand for external things."

"Connectionism captures some truths about the brain but misses what makes thought possible."

"Functionalism captures something important about mind, but it's not the whole story."

"Psychology is not reducible to neurology because psychological laws are the more stable generalizations."

"Evolution didn't give us truth-tracking abilities; it gave us reproduction-tracking abilities."

"The biological basis of mind is real, but it doesn't explain the logical structure of thought."

"Mental states are relational - they reach out to the world and past causes."

"Minds are not unified wholes but assemblies of semi-independent systems."

"Mental causation requires that thoughts have both content and causal powers."

"The architecture of mind reveals the architecture of reality, insofar as we can know it."

"Explanation in psychology must respect the autonomy of the psychological level."

"Cognitive modularity means we're not unified rational agents but collections of specialists."

"Mental causation is neither mysterious nor reducible - it's a distinct level of explanation."

"Cognition is computation with a specific purpose: maintaining accurate models of the world."

"Rationality is constrained by architecture, but architecture itself is a product of evolution."

"The Chinese Room argument shows that syntax alone cannot produce semantics."

"Consciousness cannot be reduced to computational processes alone."

"The hard problem of consciousness remains unsolved by physicalist approaches."

"Science is the systematic questioning of what we think we know."

"The mind and body are not separate; they are one integrated system."

"Science is humanity's attempt to read God's handwriting."

"Science is faith in the comprehensibility of the universe."