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"Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating an unlimited number of new ideas. Once it is programmed with a basic self-interest and an ability to communicate with others, its own logic will impel it, in the fullness of time, to respect the interests of ever-increasing numbers of others. It is reason too that can always take note of the shortcomings of previous exercises of reasoning, and update and improve itself in response. And if you detect a flaw in this argument, it is reason that allows you to point it out and defend an alternative."
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"Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language."
Art
"But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses."
Information
"I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor."
Artist
"Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?"
Mind
"Personality and socialization aren't the same thing."
Personality
"As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones."
Equality
"I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker."
Radical
"The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero."
Doctrine
"There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization."
Culture
"Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another."
Psychology
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"Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have."
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Personal Development
"Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Facts are always required to draw conclusions and make serious decisions."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If you give people the reasons to reason and you don't reason, reason!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating an unlimited number of new ideas. Once it is programmed with a basic self-interest and an ability to communicate with others, its own logic will impel it, in the fullness of time, to respect the interests of ever-increasing numbers of others. It is reason too that can always take note of the shortcomings of previous exercises of reasoning, and update and improve itself in response. And if you detect a flaw in this argument, it is reason that allows you to point it out and defend an alternative."
Author Name
Personal Development
"He who thinks and thinks for himself, will always have a claim to thanks; it is no matter whether it be right or wrong, so as it be explicit. If it is right, it will serve as a guide to direct; if wrong, as a beacon to warn."
Author Name
Personal Development
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