Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 83 of 138
Computation is in the eye of the beholder
When I add two plus two to get four, that computation is not observer relative. I am doing that regardless of what anybody thinks. But when I punch: ”2+2 =” on my pocket calculator and it prints out “4” it knows nothing of computation, arithmetic, or symbols, because it knows nothing about anything. Intrinsically it is a complex electronic circuit that we use to compute with. The electrical state transitions are intrinsic to the machine, but the computation is in the eye of the beholder. What goes for the calculator goes for any commercial computer. The sense in which computation is in the machine is the sense in which information is in a book. It is there alright, but it is observer relative and not intrinsic. For this reason you could not discover that the brain is a digital computer, because computation is not discovered in nature, it is assigned to it. So the question, Is the brain a digital computer? is ill defined. If it asks, Is the brain intrinsically a digital computer? the answer is that nothing is intrinsically a digital computer except for conscious agents thinking through computations.