I Don't Think The 9/11 Attacks Taught

I Listen To All These Complaints About Rudeness And Intemperateness, And The Opinion That I Come To Is That There Is No Polite Way Of Asking Somebody: Have You Considered The Possibility That Your Entire Life Has Been Devoted To A Delusion? But That’s A Good Question To Ask. Of Course We Should Ask That Question And Of Course It’s Going To Offend People. Tough.

If The Concept Of Consciousness Were To Fall To Science, What Would Happen To Our Sense Of Moral Agency And Free Will? If Conscious Experience Were Reduced Somehow To Mere Matter In Motion, What Would Happen To Our Appreciation Of Love And Pain And Dreams And Joy? If Conscious Human Beings Were Just Animated Material Objects, How Could Anything We Do To Them Be Right Or Wrong?

I Don't Think The 9/11 Attacks Taught Us Anything We Didn't Already Know About Religion. It Has Long Been Obvious - Even To The Deeply Religious - That Religious Fanaticism Is An Extremely Dangerous Deranger Of Otherwise Sane And Goodhearted People.

The Task Of The Mind Is To Produce Future, As The Poet Paul Valery Once Put It. A Mind Is Fundamentally An Anticipator, An Expectation-generator. It Mines The Present For Clues, Which It Refines With The Help Of The Materials It Has Saved From The Past, Turning Them Into Anticipations Of The Future. And Then It Acts, Rationally, On The Basis Of Those Hard-won Anticipations.

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.