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

"Akrasia" [weakness of will] in rational beings is as common as wine in France.

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 can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer.

Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard...Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill...At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.

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

The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.