p.7 We see that reason is wholly instrumental. It cannot tell us where to go; at
best it can tell us how to get there.
p.20-21 What characteristics does an organism need to enable it to exercise a sensible kind of bounded
reality? It needs some way of focusing attention - of avoiding distraction (or at least too much distraction) and
focusing on the things that need attention at a given time... Some of an organism's requirements call for continuous
activity. People need to have air... We do not have to have our attention directed to a lack of oxygen in
our bloodstream in order to take a breath, or for our heart to beat.
p.22 we need a mechanism capable of generating alternatives. A large part of our problem
solving consists in the search for good alternatives, or for improvements in alternatives that we already know... we
need a capability for acquiring facts about the environment in which we find ourselves, and a modest capability for
drawing inferences from these facts.
p.56 If flexibility (as attained, say, through strength, dexterity, or intelligence) is the main route to
fitness in a programmable social species, then the strong and the clever in such a species may have an advantage of fitness
that is almost independent of the particular content of the culture.
p.62 The only rewards that count for a Darwinian selection process are rewards that increase fitness.
p.69 In a relative sense, the fitter survive, but there is no reason to suppose
that they are the fittest in any absolute sense
p.83 matters that are independent in other respects may become interdependent where they make demands
on the same scarce resources. How is military security related to social welfare? By the fact that if you spend your
dollars for one, you don't have them to spend for the other.
p.105 I have been proposing that human reason is less a tool for modeling and predicting
the general equilibrium of the whole world system... than it is a tool for exploring specific partial needs and
problems.
