Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 64 of 138
Mind is to brain as program is to hardware
The idea was based on a convergence of work in philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. It seemed that we knew the answer to the question that faced us: the way the system works is that the brain is a digital computer and what we call the “mind” is a digital computer program or set of programs. We had made the greatest breakthrough in the history of philosophy of mind: mental states are computational states of the brain. The brain is a computer and the mind is a program or set of programs. A principle that formed the foundation for any number of textbooks was this: the mind is to the brain as the program is to the hardware.18 This view is sometimes called “computer functionalism,” though I have also baptized it “Strong Artificial Intelligence” to distinguish it from Weak Artificial Intelligence, which aims to…