The body is subject to the law of growth and decay, what grows must of necessity decay.
I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.
It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.
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.
You can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer.
We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it.
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.
I love to be with my twins. They are my true joy in life.
We fall for. . . the theories of betrayal very easily, and one of the things that's always depressed me about the left, ever since I started in politics, is their ability to imbibe the propaganda of the right and regurgitate it to the left.
I think the thing that I love the most about working in the digital cinema is that you're only limited in your cinematic technique by your imagination - you're not restricted by the physical laws of nature. You don't have to worry about physically moving a 50lb camera through space, or worry about shadows and rigging.
An honorable man would never abandon his friend in time of need, especially if they were in a foreign country. Why? For fear of acting like a coward or of being boorish. I repeat, I admire the fact that, those persons have, through human respect, more courage than Christians and priests have, through charity or through their good intentions.