"Thinking Machines: Can there be? Are we?", in The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines (1991), ed. James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna, p. 216.
Context: Seekers after the glitter of intelligence are misguided in trying to cast it in the base metal of computing. There is an amusing epilogue to this analogy: in fact, the alchemists were right. Lead can be converted into gold by a particle accelerator hurling appropriate beams at lead targets. The AI visionaries may be right in the same way, and they are likely to be wrong in the same way.
The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995)
Opening lines
"Ballad of the Grand Warden of Goose Gate" (《雁門太守行》)
Original: (zh-TW) 黑雲壓城城欲摧，甲光向日金鱗開。
Seventh Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Context: To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized — perhaps too much for our own good — in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality — for that, much is lacking. The ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for some simulacrum of morality in the love of honor and outward decorum constitutes mere civilization. So long as states waste their forces in vain and violent self-expansion, and thereby constantly thwart the slow efforts to improve the minds of their citizens by even withdrawing all support from them, nothing in the way of a moral order is to be expected. For such an end, a long internal working of each political body toward the education of its citizens is required. Everything good that is not based on a morally good disposition, however, is nothing but pretense and glittering misery. In such a condition the human species will no doubt remain until, in the way I have described, it works its way out of the chaotic conditions of its international relations.
“The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.”
Hercule Poirot
Source: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
Context: Understand this, I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.
Source: 1970s, Krishnamurti in India, 1970-71 (1971), p. 157
Context: In seeking there are several things involved: there is the seeker and the thing that he seeks after. When the seeker finds what he thinks is truth, is God, is enlightenment, he must be able to recognize it. He must recognize it, right? Recognition implies previous knowledge, otherwise you cannot recognize. I cannot recognize you if I had not met you yesterday. Therefore when I say this is truth, I have already known it and therefore it is not truth. So a man who is seeking truth lives a life of hypocrisy, because his truth is the projection of his memory, of his desire, of his intentions to find something other than "what is", a formula. So seeking implies duality — the one who seeks and the thing sought after — and where there is duality there is conflict. There is wastage of energy. So you can never find it, you can never invite it.
“5003. Tho' all Men were made of one Metal, yet they were not cast all in the same Mould.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“and don’t start your own line of glitter and try to sell it at Sephora.”
Source: City of Heavenly Fire
“Of my Base metal may be filed a Key,
That shall unlock the Door he howls without.”
The Rubaiyat (1120)
Context: The Vine had struck a fibre: which about
If clings my being — let the Dervish flout;
Of my Base metal may be filed a Key,
That shall unlock the Door he howls without.
“Once a computer achieves human intelligence it will necessarily roar past it.”
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)
