Words Are Memes That Can Be Pronounced.

Some Of The Greatest, Most Revolutionary Advances In Science Have Been Given Their Initial Expression In Attractively Modest Terms, With No Fanfare.

What You Can Imagine Depends On What You Know.

We Should Get Used To The Idea That We'll Probably Never Be Able To Find - And Confirm - A Good Explanation Of The Ultimate Origin Of The Universe, Though I See No Reason To Believe That We Can't Press Much Further On This Question Than We Have Managed To Date.

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.

Isn't It True That Whatever Isn't Determined By Our Genes Must Be Determined By Our Environment? What Else Is There? There's Nature And There's Nurture. Is There Also Some X, Some Further Contributor To What We Are? There's Chance. Luck. This Extra Ingredient Is Important But Doesn't Have To Come From The Quantum Bowels Of Our Atoms Or From Some Distant Star. It Is All Around Us In The Causeless Coin-flipping Of Our Noisy World, Automatically Filling In The Gaps Of Specification Left Unfixed By Our Genes, And Unfixed By Salient Causes In Our Environment.