p.1 All organisms with complex nervous systems are faced with the moment-by-moment question that is posed by life: What shall I do next? Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin, 1994

p.8 Learning about the world means... adventuring within it. J.W.N. Watkins, 1974

p.13 good operational definitions of intelligence center on versatility in problem solving... I like Jean Piaget's emphasis, that intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do. This captures the element of novelty, the coping and groping ability needed when there is no "right answer," when business as usual isn't likely to suffice. Intelligent improvising... Intelligence is about the process of improvising and polishing on the timescale of thought and action.

p.13-14 The Neurobiologist Horace Barlow... points us toward experimentally testable aspects, by saying that intelligence is all about making a guess - not any old guess, of course, but one that discovers some new underlying order.

p.14 you routinely guess what comes next, even subconsciously

p.15 The best indicators of intelligence may be found in the simpler but less predictable problems that confront animals - those rare or novel situations for which evolution has not provided a standard response, so that the animal has to improvise, using its intellectual wherewithal... "intelligence"... also implies flexibility and creativity... an "ability to slip the bounds of instinct and generate novel solutions to problems."

p.23 Perhaps we should say that planning involves something... closer to the way in which we procrastinate, figuring out what can safely be put off until tomorrow (or avoided altogether).

p.23-24 Multistage planning is perhaps best seen in an advanced type of social intelligence: making a mental model of someone else's mental model, then exploiting it... What's really difficult is to make a detailed advance plan in response to a unique situation... It requires imagining multiple scenarios

p.25 Could it be that... guessing is the name of the game during mental calculations as well as during creative thinking?

p.27 Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think about - yet. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991

p.27 As Charles Mingus said about jazz, you can't improvise from nothing, you have to improvise from something.

p.28 Creating a novel plan of action has to start somewhere and then refine things. The two greatest examples of creativity in action, species evolution and the immune response, both utilize a darwinian process to shape up crude beginnings into something of quality.

p.29 One reason that I'm going to hereafter avoid a discussion of consciousness in favor of intelligence underpinnings is that considerations of consciousness quickly lead to a passive observer as the end point, rather than someone who explores, who adventures within the world.

p.32-33 narratives are an automatic part of everyday life... we make stories out of most things... There are lots of standard relationships, with familiar roles for the players, and we guess from the context what goes next into any unfilled gaps. Often we guess well

p.33 "Perception," it has been recently said, "may be regarded as primarily the modification of an anticipation." It is always an active process, conditioned by our expectations and adapted to situations. E.M. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 1960

p.34 Actions produce expectations about what sensory inflow will result from them

p.35 Reducing things to basics - the physicists' rallying cry - is an excellent scientific strategy, as long as the basics are at an appropriate level of organization... The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter... points out that the cause of a traffic jam is not to be found within a single car or its elements. Traffic jams are an example of self-organization

p.39 what you see under normal circumstances owes its stability to a mental model that you construct.

p.39 We are always guessing, filling in the details when something is heard faintly.

p.42 The price of progress is often an unfamiliarity with other levels of organization, except for those just above or below that of your specialty.

p.43 All our sensations are patterns spread out in time and space

p.44 Intelligence is all about improvising, creating a wide repertoire of behaviors, "good moves" for various situations.

p.91 Foresight of phenomena and power over them depend on knowledge of their sequences John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism, 1865

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953

p.92 We are always saying something we've never said before. The other novelty generator, operating just as frequently in our lives (though often subconsciously), is that "What happens next?" predictor, mentioned in chapter 2 in the context of humor and the distressful effects of environmental incoherence.

p.93 the key feature of intelligent acts is creative divergent thinking... What we need is a process that will produce good guesses.

p.94 in asking about how neural machinery for foresight or language got started, we must bear in mind that the underlying mechanisms might serve multiple functions, any one of which could be driven by natural selection and so incidentally benefit the others... Charles Darwin reminded his readers, in a caution to his general emphasis on adaptations, that conversions of function were "so important."

p.95 We certainly have a passion for stringing things together in structured ways, ones that go far beyond the sequences produced by other animals.

p.103 Humans can simulate future courses of action and weed out the nonsense off-line... this "permits our hypotheses to die in our stead." Creativity - indeed, the whole high end of intelligence and consciousness - involves playing mental games that shape up quality.

p.104-106 it appears that a Darwin Machine must possess six essential properties, all of which must be present for the process to keep going: It involves a pattern... Copies are somehow made of this pattern... Patterns occasionally change... Copying competitions occur... The relative success of the variants is influenced by a multifaceted environment... The next generation is based on which variants survive to [the next cycle of the process]... From all this, one gets that surprising darwinian drift toward patterns that almost seem designed for their environment... no one part by itself will suffice. Without all six essentials, the process will shortly grind to a halt.

p.106 People also associate the darwinian essentials exclusively with biology... Mistaking a part for the process... is why it has taken a century for scientists to realize that thought patterns may also need to be repeatedly copied - and that copies of thoughts may need to compete with copies of alternative ones on "islands" during a series of mental "climate changes" in order to rapidly evolve an intelligent guess.

p.107 what are those patterns that we might need to clone, on the timescale of thought and action?

p.112 We build mental models that represent significant aspects of our physical and social world, and we manipulate elements of those models when we think, plan, and try to explain events of that world. The ability to construct and manipulate valid models of reality provides humans with our distinctive adaptive advantage; it must be considered one of the crowning achievements of the human intellect. Gordon H. Bower and Daniel G. Morrow, 1990

p.114 This chapter describes the building blocks with which I can imagine how a thinking machine could be constructed.

p.136 I think divergent thinking is the most important application of the neocortical Darwin Machine... How do you guess, when the answer isn't obvious? Your process first needs to find some candidates, then it needs to compare them for reasonableness.
 Happily, cloning competitions can do just that.

p.138 As Henry David Thoreau said, "We hear and apprehend only what we already half know."

p.149 Scary? Personally, I find ignorance scary.

p.150 The darwinian process at its core is, at least among biologists, widely understood as a creative mechanism.

p.168 "Intelligence is that faculty of mind by which order is perceived in a situation previously considered disordered." [Fatmi, Young, A definition of intelligence, Nature 228:97 (1970)]