(3089/898) Dennett et al.

243) The distinction between responsible moral agents and beings with diminished or no responsibility is coherent, real, and important. It is coherent, even if in many instances it is hard to apply; it draws an empirically real line, in that we don't all fall on one side; and, most important, the distinction matters: the use we make of it plays a crucial role in the quality and meaning of our lives. [...] We want to hold ourselves and others responsible, but we recognize that our intuitions often support the judgement that a particular individual has "diminished responsibility" because of his or her infirmities, or because of particularly dire circumstances upon upbringing or at the time of action. We also find it plausible to judge that nonhuman animals, infants, and those who are severely handicapped mentally are not responsible at all. But since we are all more or less imperfect, will there be anyone left to be responsible after we have excused all those with good excuses? [...] We must set up some efficiently determinable threshold for legal competence, never for a moment supposing that there couldn't be intuitively persuasive "counterexamples" to whatever line we draw, but declaring in advance that such pleas will not be entertained. [...] The effect of such an institution [...] is to create [...] a class of legally culpable agents whose subsequent liability to punishment maintains the credibility of the sanctions of the laws. The institution, if it is to maintain itself, must provide for the fine tuning of its arbitrary thresholds as new information (or misinformation) emerges that might undercut its credibility. One can speculate that there is an optimal setting of the competence threshold (for any particular combination of social circumstances, degree of public sophistication, and so on) that maximizes the bracing effect of the law. A higher than optimal threshold would encourage a sort of malingering on the part of the defendants, which, if recognized by the populace, would diminish their respect for the law and hence diminish its deterrent effect. And a lower than optimal threshold would yield a diminishing return of deterrence and lead to the punishment of individuals who, in the eyes of society, "really couldn't help it." The public perception of the fairness of the law is a critical factor in its effectiveness.

Daniel C. Dennett
Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Having (1984)

244) GIGO: Garbage in, garbage out.

Computer-users' aphorism (c. 1970) [B16]

245) In fact, of course, science is an unparalleled playground of the imagination, populated by unlikely characters with wonderful names (messenger RNA, black holes, quarks) and capable of performing the most amazing deeds: sub-atomic whirling dervishes that can be in several places - everywhere and nowhere - at the same time; molecular hoop-snakes biting their own tails; self-copying spiral staircases bearing coded instructions; miniature keys searching for the locks in which they fit, on floating odysseys in a trillion synaptic gulfs.

Daniel C. Dennett
"Reflections on 'A Conversation With Einstein's Brain'" in
The Mind's I (1981),
Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, eds.

246) Hopeful monsters.

Richard Goldschmidt
The Material Basis of Evolution (1940)

247) [Goldschmidt] broke sharply with the synthetic theory, however, in arguing that new species arise abruptly by discontinuous variation, or macromutation. He admitted that the vast majority of macromutations could only be viewed as disastrous - these he called "monsters". But, Goldschmidt continued, every once in a while a macromutation might, by sheer good fortune, adapt an organism to a new mode of life, a "hopeful monster" in his terminology. Macroevolution proceeds by the rare success of these hopeful monsters, not by an accumulation of small changes within populations.

Stephen Jay Gould
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

248) Sometimes I wonder which is the most important function of the refrigerator: storing the food on the inside or keeping the messages on the outside.

Donald A. Norman
Turn Signals Are The Facial Expressions
of Automobiles (1992)

249) [The 1980's were] a time when the voice of the superego was not widely heard in the land, nor were ids much reigned in. On the contrary, in the 1980's, the id ruled the national psyche.

Herbert Muschamp
"A Man Who Lives in Two Glass Houses",
Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure Section (10/17/93)

Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 817 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.