Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.

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

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.

If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.

My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business