You Don't Understand Anything Until You Learn

Each Part Of The Mind Sees Only A Little Of What Happens In Some Others, And That Little Is Swiftly Refined, Reformulated And "represented." We Like To Believe That These Fragments Have Meanings In Themselves - Apart From The Great Webs Of Structure From Which They Emerge - And Indeed This Illusion Is Valuable To Us Qua Thinkers - But Not To Us As Psychologists - Because It Leads Us To Think That Expressible Knowledge Is The First Thing To Study.

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.

Everything, Including That Which Happens In Our Brains, Depends On These And Only On These: A Set Of Fixed, Deterministic Laws.

If You Understand Something In Only One Way, Then You Don't Really Understand It At All. The Secret Of What Anything Means To Us Depends On How We've Connected It To All Other Things We Know. Well-connected Representations Let You Turn Ideas Around In Your Mind, To Envision Things From Many Perspectives Until You Find One That Works For You. And That's What We Mean By Thinking!

The Brain Happens To Be A Meat Machine.