Valentino Braitenberg

"Imagine the inside of St. Peter’s in Rome filled with a huge quantity of fibers around a millimeter in diameter that crisscross the building in every direction creating a firm mat – then you have an i…"

"We will talk only about machines with very simple internal structures, too simple in fact to be interesting from the point of view of mechanical or electrical engineering. Interest arises, rather, whe…"

"A psychological consequence of this is the following: when we analyze a mechanism we tend to over estimate its complexity."

"We must be careful, however, not to let the process of acquiring new ideas interfere with the detailed knowledge that our vehicle has assiduously collected and carefully stored in many associative con…"

"sketch a few facts about animal brains that have inspired some of the properties of our vehicles, and their behavior will then seem less gratuitous than it may have seemed up to this poin.t"

"This is an exercise in fictional science, or science fiction, if you like that better. Not for amusement: science fiction in the service of science. Or just science, if you agree that fiction is a par…"

"It is actually impossible in theory to determine exactly what the hidden mechanism is without opening the box, since there are always many different mechanisms with identical behavior. Quite apart fro…"

"Ad Aertsen succeeds in allowing his sense of humour to shine through the deep seriousness of his scientific ethos. He also has a very balanced attitude to the question of "theory or experiment."