John Searle Quotes About Computers

Quotes about: Computers

• Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard...Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill...At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.

  John Searle

  Science, Technology, Childhood

• You can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer.

  John Searle

  Brain, Digital, Computer

• The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.

  John Searle

  Mind, Computer, Reason

  "Minds, Brains and Science". Book by John R. Searle, 1984.

• I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

  John Searle

  Car, Machines, Arguing

  "Minds, Brains and Programs". Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 1980.

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