I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.
Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.
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.
There's no reason that patients can't have electronic access to their complete medical history. . . Just as people can check their bank account information online or using their ATM card, patients who want to should have electronic access to their medical records.
Trace the stars with your fingers in hopes you’ll connect the dots, but don’t get caught in the lines that aren’t really there ‘cause there is life in every breath you take and there is hope with every move you make, and every single mistake you think you’ve made should make you feel alive ‘cause you only have one chance to live in this spec we call life.
It was not war, it was murder.
Simply put, you believer that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy.