Atheists From The United States

"When the Minsky and Papert book came out, entitled Perceptrons... I saw they'd done some serious work here, and there was some good mathematics in this book, but I said, "My God, what a hatchet job."... I felt that they had sufficiently narrowly defined what the perceptron was, that they were able to prove that it could do practically nothing... I couldn't understand what the point of it was, why the hell they did it. But I know how long it takes to write a book. I figured that they must have gotten inspired to write that book really early on to squelch the field, to do what they could to stick pins in the balloon. But by the time the book came out, the field was already gone. There was just about nobody doing it."

"Although my own previous enthusiasm has been for syntactically rich languages like the Algol family, I now see clearly and concretely the force of Minsky's 1970 Turing lecture, in which he argued that Lisp's uniformity of structure and power of self reference gave the programmer capabilities whose content was well worth the sacrifice of visual form."

"... invented a very simple single-layer device called a . ...Unfortunately, its influence was damped by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, who proved [in Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry (1969)] that the Perceptron architecture and learning rule could not execute the "exclusive OR" and therefore could not learn. This killed interest in Perceptrons for a number of years... It is possible to construct multilayer networks of simple units that could easily execute the exclusive OR... Minsky and Papert would have contributed more if they had produced a solution to this problem rather than beating the Perceptron to death."

"It would seem that Perceptrons has much the same role as The Necronomicon -- that is, often cited but never read."

"I had the naive idea that if one could build a big enough network, with enough memory loops, it might get lucky and acquire the ability to envision things in its head. This became a field of study later. It was called self-organizing random networks. Even today, I still get letters from young students who say, 'Why are you people trying to program intelligence? Why don't you try to find a way to build a nervous system that will just spontaneously create it?' Finally, I decided that either this was a bad idea or it would take thousands or millions of neurons to make it work, and I couldn't afford to try to build a machine like that."

"‘In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable... Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets... I have warned [people in the Pentagon] again and again that we are getting into very dangerous country. They don’t seem to understand."

"Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer."

"In today's computer science curricula … almost all their time is devoted to formal classification of syntactic language types, defeatist unsolvability theories, folklore about systems programming, and generally trivial fragments of "optimization of logic design" — the latter often in situations where the art of heuristic programming has far outreached the special-case "theories" so grimly taught and tested — and invocations about programming style almost sure to be outmoded before the student graduates."

"We usually say that one must first understand simpler things. But what if feelings and viewpoints are the simpler things?"

"When you "get an idea," or "solve a problem," or have a "memorable experience," you create what we shall call a K-line. This K-line gets connected to those "mental agencies" that were actively involved in the memorable event. When that K-line is later "activated," it reactivates some of those mental agencies, creating a "partial mental state" resembling the original."

"Positive general principles need always to be supplemented by negative, anecdotal censors. For, it hardly ever pays to alter a general mechanism to correct a particular bug."

"All intelligent persons also possess some larger-scale frame-systems whose members seemed at first impossibly different — like water with electricity, or poetry with music. Yet many such analogies — along with the knowledge of how to apply them — are among our most powerful tools of thought. They explain our ability sometimes to see one thing — or idea — as though it were another, and thus to apply knowledge and experience gathered in one domain to solve problems in another. It is thus that we transfer knowledge via the paradigms of Science. We learn to see gases and fluids as particles, particles as waves, and waves as envelopes of growing spheres."

"For avoiding nonsense in general, we might accumulate millions of censors. For all we know, this "negative meta-knowledge" — about patterns of thought and inference that have been found defective or harmful — may be a large portion of all we know."

"Questioning one's own "top-level" goals always reveals the paradox-oscillation of ultimate purpose. How could one decide that a goal is worthwhile — unless one already knew what it is that is worthwhile?"

"Since we have no systematic way to avoid all the inconsistencies of commonsense logic, each person must find his own way by building a private collection of "cognitive censors" to suppress the kinds of mistakes he has discovered in the past."

"I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning. In particular, I doubt that any logic that prohibits self-reference can be adequate for psychology: no mind can have enough power — without the power to think about Thinking itself. Without Self-Reference it would seem immeasurably harder to achieve Self-Consciousness — which, so far as I can see, requires at least some capacity to reflect on what it does. If Russell shattered our hopes for making a completely reliable version of commonsense reasoning, still we can try to find the islands of "local consistency," in which naive reasoning remains correct."

"If there's something you like very much then you should regard this not as you feeling good but as a kind of brain cancer, because it means that some small part of your mind has figured out how to turn off all the other things."

"If you like somebody's work -- just go and see them. However, don't ask for their autograph. A lot of people came and asked me for my autograph -- and it's creepy. What I did is read everything they published first... and correct them. That's what they really want. Every smart person wants to be corrected, not admired."

"You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way."

"An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind."

"When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems."

"Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children."

"Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed."

"I was one of the first people to almost actually vomit over hearing the use of the phrase "family values" and I pride myself on never having fallen for the idea that Barbara Bush was sweet and grandmotherly. I met Barbara Bush and, as I expected, she was a tank with eyes, not a nice person at all and why should that blow anybody away?"

"I have terrible short-term memory loss, which I like to think of as Presidential eligibility."

"I don't have a bank account because I don't know my mother's maiden name and apparently that's the key to the whole thing right there. I go in every few weeks and guess."

"They're not going to teach science at all. What they do is take the science students down to the lake, tie them in burlap sacks and throw them in. If God thinks they're good science students, they float."

"[A]s I regularly emphasize when discussing Islam, no one is suffering under its doctrine more than Muslims themselves: Muslim jihadists primarily kill other Muslims. And the laws against apostasy, blasphemy, idolatry, and other forms of peaceful expression diminish the freedoms of Muslims far more than those of non-Muslims living in the West. Liberals like [Glenn] Greenwald, who are so eager to swing the flail of Islamophobia, display a sickening insensitivity to the plight of women, homosexuals, and freethinkers throughout the Muslim world. At this moment, millions of women and girls have been abandoned to illiteracy, compulsory marriage, and lives of slavery and abuse under the guise of “multiculturalism” and “religious sensitivity.” And the most liberal Muslim minds are forced into hiding. The best way to address this problem is by no means obvious. But lying about its cause, and defaming those who speak honestly in defense of a global civil society, seems a very unlikely path to a solution."

"Harris' self-loving mentality amounts to this: those primitive Muslims are so tribal for reflexively siding with their own kind, while I constantly tout the superiority of my own side and justify what We do against Them. How anyone can read any of these passages and object to claims that Harris' worldview is grounded in deep anti-Muslim animus is staggering. He is at least as tribal, jingoistic, and provincial as those he condemns for those human failings, as he constantly hails the nobility of his side while demeaning those Others."

"For a man who likes to badger Muslims about their 'reflexive solidarity' with Arab suffering, Harris seems keen to display his own tribal affections for the Jewish state. The virtue of Israel and the wickedness of her enemies are recurring themes in his work."

"Reading Sam Harris is like drinking water from a cool stream on a hot day."

"He makes his inevitable pilgrimage to the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition, though without pausing to acquaint himself with the Inquisition's actual history or any of the recent scholarship on it. He more or less explicitly states that every episode of violence in Christian history is a natural consequence of Christianity's basic tenets (which is obviously false), and that Christianity's twenty centuries of unprecedented and still unmatched moral triumphs – its care of widows and orphans, its alms-houses, hospitals, foundling homes, schools, shelters, relief organizations, soup kitchens, medical missions, charitable aid societies, and so on – are simply expressions of normal human kindness, with no necessary connection to Christian conviction (which is even more obviously false)."

"Sam Harris, a Jewish warrior against theocracy and bigotry of all stripes, [...]."

"His passion was for deep philosophical questions, and he could talk for hours and hours... Sometimes you'd want to say to him, 'What about the Yankees?' or 'Look at the leaves, they're changing color!'"

"The End of Faith is one of those books that deserves to replace the Gideon Bible in every hotel room in the land."

"Mr. Harris argues cogently, pithily, wittily, passionately, that religious "faith" is leading humanity straight to a very earthly hell."

"[About the reactions to the attack on Israel in October 2023:] The moral, not just untenability, the abomination we're witnessing where you have the same people who are equally exercised over Halloween costumes that are cultural appropriation and their defending what happened in Israel last week. That dissonance, I think, is something we need to not lose sight of culture-wide."

"Happiness and suffering, however extreme, are mental events. The mind depends upon the body, and the body upon the world, but everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter. This fact offers ample opportunity to make the best of bad situations—changing your perception of the world is often as good as changing the world—but it also allows a person to be miserable even when all the material and social conditions for happiness have been met. During the normal course of events, your mind will determine the quality of your life."

"I never made more effort than I did when practicing under U Pandita. But most of this effort arose from the very illusion of bondage to the self that I was seeking to overcome. The model of this practice is that one must climb the mountain so that freedom can be found at the top. But the self is already an illusion, and that truth can be glimpsed directly, at the mountain's base or anywhere else along the path. One can then return to this insight, again and again, as one's sole method of meditation—thereby arriving at the goal in each moment of actual practice."

"We wouldn't attempt to meditate, or engage in any other contemplative practice, if we didn't feel that something about our experience needed to be improved. But here lies one of the central paradoxes of spiritual life, because this very feeling of dissatisfaction causes us to overlook the intrinsic freedom of consciousness in the present. As we have seen, there are good reasons to believe that adopting a practice like meditation can lead to positive changes in one's life. But the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self—and to seek such freedom, as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains of one's apparent bondage in each moment."

"The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment—the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one's head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don't believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found—and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears."

"The feeling that we call "I" seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will. And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished."

"The conventional sense of self is an illusion—and [] spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. There are logical and scientific reasons to accept this claim, but recognizing it to be true is not a matter of understanding these reasons. Like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation."

"Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion."

"Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world."

"It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions."

"There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress. And yet, living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren't born with club feet or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments."

"The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior."

"Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics - by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck."

"I do not choose to choose what I choose."