We Turn To Quantities When We Can't

The Secret Of What Anything Means To Us Depends On How We've Connected It To All The Other Things We Know. That's Why It's Almost Always Wrong To Seek The "real Meaning" Of Anything. A Thing With Just One Meaning Has Scarcely Any Meaning At All.

I Believed In Realism, As Summarized By John Mccarthy's Comment To The Effect That If We Worked Really Hard, We'd Have An Intelligent System In From Four To Four Hundred Years.

It Would Be As Useless To Perceive How Things 'actually Look' As It Would Be To Watch The Random Dots On Untuned Television Screens.

This Is A Tricky Domain Because, Unlike Simple Arithmetic, To Solve A Calculus Problem - And In Particular To Perform Integration - You Have To Be Smart About Which Integration Technique Should Be Used: Integration By Partial Fractions, Integration By Parts, And So On.

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.