Computationalism Quotes

“Mind-as-software is an unspoken background assumption that needs no justification. It is as obvious as the existence of the devil used to be. For what is the alternative to mind-as-software? A soul? Come on!
In reality, though, mind-as-software and its twin, brain-as-computer, are convenient but poor tropes when it comes to subjective experience, an expression of functional ideology run amok. They are more rhetoric than science. Once we understand the mythos for what it is, we wake as from a dream and wonder how we ever came to believe in it. The mythos that life is nothing but an algorithm limits our spiritual horizon and devalues our perspective on life, experience, and the place of sentience in time's wide circuit.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed

“[Philosophy] excludes the doctrine of angels, and all such things as are thought to be neither bodies nor properties of bodies; there being in them no place for composition nor division, nor any capacity of more and less, that is to say, no place for ratiocination [or computation].”
― Thomas Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury: Volume 1

“Their [personal digital assistants] siren voices are living proof of our times - that our mind is software, running on the computer that is our brain. Consciousness is just a couple of clever hack away. We are only meat machines, no better, and increasingly, worse, than computers. According to the more triumphalist voices in the tech industry, we should revel in our soon-to-come obsolescence; we should be grateful that Homo Sapiens will have served as a bridge between biology and the inevitable next step in evolution, superintelligence. Smart money in Silicon Valley thinks so, op-ed pieces proclaim it to be so, and sleek sci-fi flicks reinforce this poor man's Nietzschean ideology.
Mind-as-software is the dominant mythos of liquid modernity, of our hyper-individualized, glove-trotting, technology-worshipping culture. It is the one remaining mythos of an age that believes itself immune to mythology. An age whose elite is witnessing with incomprehension and indifference the dying struggle of the once all-powerful mythos that sustained the West for two millennia - Christianity.”
― Christof Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed