Authors:

George Johnson Quotes

Whenever you read a book or have a conversation, the experience causes physical changes in your brain. It's a little frightening to think that every time you walk away from an encounter, your brain has been altered,

Whenever you read a book or have a conversation, the experience causes physical changes in your brain. It's a little frightening to think that every time you walk away from an encounter, your brain has been altered, sometimes permanently.

George Johnson
Book, Thinking, Brain

Whenever you read a book or have a conversation, the experience causes physical changes in your brain.

George Johnson
Book, Brain, Causes

Trying to capture the physicists' precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catcher's mitt on the other.

George Johnson
Science, Hands, Boxing

Artificial intelligence is based on the assumption that the mind can be described as some kind of formal system manipulating symbols that stand for things in the world. Thus it doesn't matter what the brain is made of, or what it uses for tokens in the great game of thinking. Using an equivalent set of tokens and rules, we can do thinking with a digital computer, just as we can play chess using cups, salt and pepper shakers, knives, forks, and spoons. Using the right software, one system (the mind) can be mapped onto the other (the computer).

George Johnson
Science, Thinking, Knives
George Johnson (2011). “Machinery of the Mind”, p.450, Crown

The weapons laboratory of Los Alamos stands as a reminder that our very power as pattern finders can work against us, that it is possible to discern enough of the universe's underlying order to tap energy so powerful that it can destroy its discoverers or slowly poison them with its waste.

George Johnson
Powerful, Order, Energy
George Johnson (2010). “Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order”, p.326, Vintage

You May Also Like: