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

How do we get from electrons to elections and from protons to presidents?

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.

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

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.

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.

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