The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.

[T]he only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.

Evolution embodies information in every part of every organism. ... This information doesn't have to be copied into the brain at all. It doesn't have to be 're…

A faith, like a species, must evolve or go extinct when the environment changes. It is not a gentle process in either case. ... It's nice to have grizzly bears…