Like nuclear power, genetic engineering is not a neutral technology. It is by its very nature too powerful for our present state o...f social and scientific development, no matter whose hands are controlling it. Just as we would say, especially after Chernobyl, that a nuclear power plant is just as dangerous in a socialist nation as it is in a capitalist one, so I would say the same thing for genetic engineering. It is inherently Eugenic in that it always requires someone to decide what is a good and a bad gene.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is commonly said, and more particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, that ridicule is the best test of truth; for that it will not stic...k where it is not just. I deny it. A truth learned in a certain light, and attacked in certain words, by men of wit and humour, may, and often doth, become ridiculous, at least so far, that the truth is only remembered and repeated for the sake of the ridicule.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women think that an engineer is a man in hip boots building a dam. They don't realize that 95 percent of engineering is done in a ...nice air-conditioned office.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't ...test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But... equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of the car or the stomach. Barring miracles, you could not run your car by doing a computer simulation of the oxidation of gasoline, and you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion. It seems obvious that a simulation of cognition will similarly not produce the effects of the neurobiology of cognition.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 »
I have come to believe ... that the stage may do more than teach, that much of our current moral instruction will not endure the t...est of being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in dramatic form will reveal itself as platitudinous and effete. That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only way therefore to try a Piece of Wit, is to translate it into a different Language: If it bears the Test you may pronounce... it true; but if it vanishes in the Experiment you may conclude it to have been a Punn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These pages reproduce me very imperfectly, and there are many things in me of which I find no trace in them. I suppose it is becau...se, in the first place, sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy; and, in the next, because I depend so much upon surrounding circumstances. When there is no call upon me, and nothing to put me to the test, I fall back into melancholy; and so the practical man, the cheerful man, the literary man, does not appear in these pages. The portrait is lacking in proportion and breadth; it is one-sided, and wants a center; it has, as it were, been painted from too near.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »