"We zijn er oorspronkelijk niet voor in de wieg gelegd om geleerden te worden; misschien komt het door een soort misbruik van onze organische vermogens dat we het toch zijn geworden, en dat tot last van de staat, die een menigte nietsnutten de kost heeft, welke de ijdelheid getooid heeft met de naam van 'filosofen'." (De La Mettrie, De mens een machine, p. 64)
“Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the 'blind watchmaker' of natural selection with the real human one. 'A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection . . . has no purpose in mind'. I think this distinction is wrong.
There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels, and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they produce what looks like foresight.” (Blackmore 1999, The Meme Machine, p. 240)
"We don't design language at all. It 'designs' itself. Languages just change spontaneously over the course of many generations. Every effort to design a language has flopped. Languages don't just change, they evolve." (Deacon 1997, The Symbolic Species, p. 109)
"The individual body, so familiar to us on our planet, dit not have to exist. The only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator." (Dawkins 2006, The Selfish Gene, p. 266)
"Despite the term selfish genes, genes do not have selves: true selves are cells; without proteins and metabolic networks of recursive amino acids and intermediary molecules genes are impotent, no more "selfish" than an unplugged toaster." (Schneider & Sagan 2005, Into the Cool, p. 111)
"The technical term “information” may be succinctly defined as any difference which makes a difference in some later event. This definition is fundamental for all analysis of cybernetic systems and organization. The definition links such analysis to the rest of science, where the causes of events are commonly not differences but forces, impacts, and the like. The link is classically exemplified by the heat engine, where available energy (i.e., negative entropy) is a function of a difference between two temperatures. In this classical instance, “information” and “negative entropy” overlap." (Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 386)
"'Wohin ist Gott?' rief er, 'ich will es euch sagen! Wir haben ihn getötet - ihr und ich! Wir alle sind seine Mörder! Aber wie haben wir dies gemacht? Wie vermochten wir das Meer auszutrinken? Wer gab uns den Schwamm, um den ganzen Horizont wegzuwischen?'"
- Nietzsche
"Wat de meeste mensen menen dat denken is, dat is het helaas niet. Wat zij als denken aanduiden, is slechts het in kaart brengen van de werkelijkheid door deze te beschrijven aan de hand van bestaande rasters zoals meetbaarheid en toetsbaarheid. Dat, beste aanwezigen, is niet denken maar herhalen. Niets meer dan dat." (Filosofie magazine 1998, 9: 37)
