Many people mistakenly suppose that the essence of consciousness is that of a control mechanism

Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

There is no success or failure in Nature.

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.