Intelligence has two parts, which we shall call the epistemological and the heuristic. The epistemological part is the representation of the world in… - John McCarthy

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Intelligence has two parts, which we shall call the epistemological and the heuristic. The epistemological part is the representation of the world in such a form that the solution of problems follows from the facts expressed in the representation. The heuristic part is the mechanism that on the basis of the information solves the problem and decides what to do. [...] The right way to think about the general problems of metaphysics and epistemology is not to attempt to clear one's own mind of all knowledge and start with 'Cogito ergo sum' and build up from there. Instead, we propose to use all of our knowledge to construct a computer program that knows. The correctness of our philosophical system will be tested by numerous comparisons between the beliefs of the program and our own observations and knowledge.

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About John McCarthy

John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and was the inventor of the Lisp programming language.

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Additional quotes by John McCarthy

When we program a computer to make choices intelligently after determining its options, examining their consequences, and deciding which is most favorable or most moral or whatever, we must program it to take an attitude towards its freedom of choice essentially isomorphic to that which a human must take to his own.

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LISP is now the second oldest programming language in present widespread use (after FORTRAN)... Its core occupies some kind of local optimum in the space of programming languages given that static friction discourages purely notational changes. Recursive use of conditional expressions, representation of symbolic information externally by lists and internally by list structure, and representation of program in the same way will probably have a very long life.

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