Minds Are Simply What Brains Do.

Common Sense Is Not A Simple Thing. Instead, It Is An Immense Society Of Hard-earned Practical Ideas - Of Multitudes Of Life-learned Rules And Exceptions, Dispositions And Tendencies, Balances And Checks.

In Science, One Learns The Most By Studying What Seems To Be The Least.

It Makes No Sense To Seek A Single Best Way To Represent Knowledge-because Each Particular Form Of Expression Also Brings Its Particular Limitations. For Example, Logic-based Systems Are Very Precise, But They Make It Hard To Do Reasoning With Analogies. Similarly, Statistical Systems Are Useful For Making Predictions, But Do Not Serve Well To Represent The Reasons Why Those Predictions Are Sometimes Correct.

How Hard Is It To Build An Intelligent Machine? I Don't Think It's So Hard, But That's My Opinion, And I've Written Two Books On How I Think One Should Do It. The Basic Idea I Promote Is That You Mustn't Look For A Magic Bullet. You Mustn't Look For One Wonderful Way To Solve All Problems. Instead You Want To Look For 20 Or 30 Ways To Solve Different Kinds Of Problems. And To Build Some Kind Of Higher Administrative Device That Figures Out What Kind Of Problem You Have And What Method To Use.

Good Theories Of The Mind Must Span At Least Three Different Scales Of Time: Slow, For The Billions Of Years In Which Our Brains Have Survivied; Fast, For The Fleeting Weeks And Months Of Childhood; And In Between, The Centuries Of Growth Of Our Ideas Through History.