John Searle Quotes

the mind is a neural computer

It seemed to me that the real philosophical breakthroughs of the 20th century were in terms of the understanding of language. What is language? Where does it come from, how does it work, what does it do?

I'm interested in the way language is used to navigate the world around us.

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.

Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.

Structure is more important than content in the transmission of information.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

I first got interested in the brain through computers.

Even the best computer in the world has no idea that it exists. You do. No one knows what creates that ineffable awareness that we're here.

What's most interesting about trying to figure out AI is the questions that it forces you to ask about the nature of consciousness.

We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.

The computer is a mind machine. It doesn't have its own psychology, but in a way it presents itself as though it does.

The brain can be seen as a complex machine, like a gooey computer.

Thought rules mankind.

You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.

We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.

The primary implication is that we're going to combine our intelligence with computers. We're going to make ourselves smarter. By the 2030s, they will literally go inside our bodies and inside our brains.

Linguistics becomes an ever eerier area, like I feel like I'm in Oz, Just trying to tell it like it was.

There is so much to the human mind we don't understand. But, you see, if you have faith, you can do anything.

We have learned more about the brain in the last fifteen years than in all prior human history, and the mind, once considered out of reach, is finally assuming center stage.

Metaphysics, in whatever latitude the term be taken, is a science, or complement of sciences, exclusively occupied with mind.

In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because rocks have the sense to go away when you kick them.

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.

Computers combine things to make new knowledge at such high speed that we cannot absorb it.