One Can Acquire Certainty Only By Amputating

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.

Each Practitioner Thinks There's One Magic Way To Get A Machine To Be Smart, And So They're All Wasting Their Time In A Sense. On The Other Hand, Each Of Them Is Improving Some Particular Method, So Maybe Someday In The Near Future, Or Maybe It's Two Generations Away, Someone Else Will Come Around And Say, "let's Put All These Together," And Then It Will Be Smart.

Logic Doesn't Apply To The Real World. D. R. Hofstadter And D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.

In General, We’re Least Aware Of What Our Minds Do Best.

Our Present Culture May Be Largely Shaped By This Strange Idea Of Isolating Children's Thought From Adult Thought. Perhaps The Way Our Culture Educates Its Children Better Explains Why Most Of Us Come Out As Dumb As They Do, Than It Explains How Some Of Us Come Out As Smart As They Do.