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5 - Is the brain a digital computer?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

John R. Searle
John R. Searle
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Summary

Presidential Address delivered before the Sixty-fourth Annual Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Los Angeles, California, March 30, 1990.

INTRODUCTION, STRONG AI, WEAK AI AND COGNITIVISM

There are different ways to present a Presidential Address to the APA; the one I have chosen is simply to report on work that I am doing right now, on work in progress. I am going to present some of my further explorations into the computational model of the mind.

The basic idea of the computer model of the mind is that the mind is the program and the brain the hardware of a computational system. A slogan one often sees is “the mind is to the brain as the program is to the hardware.”

Let us begin our investigation of this claim by distinguishing three questions:

  1. (1) Is the brain a digital computer?

  2. (2) Is the mind a computer program?

  3. (3) Can the operations of the brain be simulated on a digital computer?

I will be addressing 1 and not 2 or 3. I think 2 can be decisively answered in the negative. Since programs are defined purely formally or syntactically and since minds have an intrinsic mental content, it follows immediately that the program by itself cannot constitute the mind. The formal syntax of the program does not by itself guarantee the presence of mental contents. I showed this a decade ago in the Chinese Room Argument (Searle, 1980).

Type
Chapter
Information
Philosophy in a New Century
Selected Essays
 , pp. 86 - 106
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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References

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