There is no success or failure in Nature.

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.

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

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

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

In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect.