Let us understand that a skyhook is a "mind-first" force or power or process, an exception to the principle… — Daniel Dennett
Let us understand that a skyhook is a "mind-first" force or power or process, an exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retroactively explicable) product of the basic process.
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More from this book
If you have ever asked yourself if there are facts about yourself (about your health, your competence, your prospects) you would rather not know, and decided that there were, you should be prepared to consider seriously the suggestion that the best — perhaps the only — way to ensure that such facts are not imposed on people is by prohibiting investigations likely to discover them.
Political correctness, in the extreme versions worthy of the name, is antithetical to almost all surprising advances in thought. We might call it eumemics, since it is, like the extreme eugenics of Social Darwinists, an attempt to impose myopically derived standards of safety and goodness on the bounty of nature. Few today — but there are a few — would brand all genetic counseling, all genetic policies, with the condemnatory title of eugenics.
[T]he only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
