As a first approximation, I define "belief" not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc.) but as the subject's investm...ent in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To a first approximation, the intentional strategy consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rationa...l agent with beliefs and desires and other mental states exhibiting what Brentano and others call intentionality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to prod...uce an unknown that we may let its ideologists call Socialism the Communist dictators have produced a brutal approximation of monopoly Capitalism, a system that has all the disadvantages of our own, with none of the palliatives which come to us from surviving competition and from the essential division of economic and political power which has so far made it possible for the humane traditions of the Western world to continue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true critic is a scrupulous avoider of formulae; he refrains from statements which pretend to be literally true; he finds fact... nowhere and approximation always.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondency, an odious approximation, a haunting... conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity.... He is known by his knock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your brain receives, stores, and processes information, dispenses results, and controls your biological equipment. When properly p...rogrammed, computers can do likewise, except that they control electromechanical rather than biological equipment. Beyond these functional similarities, computers and brains have virtually nothing in common. To begin with, the electronic circuits in a computer are not analogous to brain cells. The two differ in appearance, in structure, and in principles of operation. The key functions of information storage and information processing are served in computers by physically different components. In a typical computer, one finds separate CPU and memory units; but even in computer designs where processing circuits are intermixed, the two functions remain distinct. In the brain they are not distinct; they're distributed throughout the brain and intermixed in ways that we don't understand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »