All our access to mathematics... is because we do computation. We can understand mathematics because our brain can compute some part of mathematics, … - Joscha Bach

Minds are software states... Software doesn't have identity. Software in some sense is a physical law. ...The maintenance of the identity is not terminal. It's instrumental to something else. You maintain your identity so you can serve your meaning. So you can do the things that you are supposed to do before you die. ...For most people the fear of death is the fear of dying before they are done with the things that they feel they have to do even though they cannot quite put their finger on... what that is.

[D]espite inevitable difficulties and methodological problems, the design of unified architectures modeling the breadth of mental capabilities in a single system is a crucial stage in understanding the human mind...

If we want to understand music we have to go beyond understanding sound. We have to understand the transformations that sound can have if you play a different pitch. We have to arrange the sound in a sequencer that gives you rhythms, and so on, and then we want to identify some kind of musical grammar that we can use to... control the sequencer. So we have stacked structures that simulate the world. ...If you want to model a world of music you need to have the lowest level of the precepts, then the higher levels of mental simulations, which give the sequences... and the grammars of music... [B]eyond this you have the conceptual landscape that you can use to describe the different styles of music. ...[I]f you go up in the hierarchy, you get to more and more abstract models, more and more conceptual models, and more and more analytic models. ...[T]hese are causal models...