"Speaking crudely, a living system—an organism—consists of a symbiotic relationship between a metabolism and a replicator. ...the replicator contains the blueprint of the organism, with the information needed to grow, make repairs, and reproduce. ...the metabolism provides the energy and raw materials needed to build and run the replicator."

“In a world of superintelligent humans, the account of a quest to prove a theorem may take on a universality in its drama that seems inconceivable to us now. I believe that rational adventure is fundamental to the human spirit, and that it won't go away. But it will evolve of necessity to take place in the increasingly abstract domains that characterize the boundaries and frontiers of an evolving and ever more complex and abstract world. As a result, it will evolve into forms that are difficult for us to even think about at this point in time.”

“Our goal is to build a broad-based model of key components of the economy: households, firms, banks and government... The failure to embrace things like simulation has inhibited progress in economics.”

“We're rapidly creating an extraordinary silicon-based petri dish for evolution of intelligence. By the year 2025... we're likely to have computers whose raw processing power exceeds that of the human brain. Also, we're likely to have more computers than people...”

“Once we can manipulate our genome, Lamarckian fashion, the rate of change will be staggering.”

“The paradox that immediately bothers everyone who learns about the second law is this: If systems tend to become more disordered, why, then, do we see so much order around us? ...It seems to conflict with our "creation myth": In the beginning, there was a big bang. ...no one is saying that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong, just that there is a contrapuntal process organizing things at a higher level.”

“On learning more astronomy, in the phenomenon of "averted vision," I found a justification for my rationale about the roundabout path to metaphysics via physics: to see a faint star, it's necessary to look away from it; as soon as one looks at it directly, it vanishes.”