Our biological essence, our instinct remnants, are weak and subtle, and they are hard to get at. Learnings of the extrinsic sort are more powerful than our deepest impulses. These deepest impulses in the human species, at the points where the instincts have been lost almost entirely, where they are extremely weak, extremely subtle and delicate, where you have to dig to find them, this is where I speak of introspective biology, of biological phenomenology, implying that one of the necessary methods in the search for self, the search for spontaneity and for naturalness is a matter of closing your eyes, cutting down the noise, turning off the thoughts, putting away all busyness, just relaxing in a kind of Taoistic and receptive fashion.

— Abraham Maslow, Farther Reaches of Human Nature

Bits that are embodied as structure (varying in space, invariant across time) we perceive as memory, and bits that are embodied as sequence (varying in time, invariant across space) we perceive as code. Gates are the intersections where bits span both worlds at the moments of transition from one instant to the next.

— George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral

Who advocates in the requirements process for the product itself—its conceptual integrity, its efficiency, its economy, its robustness? Often, no one. As often, an architect or engineer who can offer only opinion based on taste and instinct, unbuttressed as yet by facts.

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design

Next I suggest that YOU get to decide what’s a game and what isn’t, what needs to be taken seriously and what doesn’t. Life doesn’t come prelabeled as serious and not serious. You are the labeler.

— Jim Dethmer, Conscious Competition

Kant seems to argue that dignity flows from and is thus conceptually subordinate to autonomy, which he takes to be the central feature giving humans moral value.

— Anja Publications, Philosophy Now