“Our ignorance of brain function is currently so very nearly total that we could not even begin to frame appropriate research strategies. We would stand before the open brain, fancy instruments in hand, roughly as an unschooled labourer might stand before the exposed wiring of a computer: awed perhaps, but surely helpless. A microanalysis of brain functions is, moreover, no more useful for understanding anything about thinking than a corresponding analysis of the pulses flowing through a computer would be for understanding what program the computer is running. Such analyses would simply be at the wrong conceptual level. They might help to decide crucial experiments, but only after such experiments had been designed on the basis of much higher-level (for example, linguistic) theories.”

— Joseph Weizenbaum

Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation (1976)

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Joseph Weizenbaum 1

German-American computer scientist 1923–2008

David Marr (1945–1980) British neuroscientist and psychologist

Source: Paul W. Glimcher (2004). Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain.

“The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most “things” now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

"Cardboard Darwinism", pp. 48–49
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“We now understand that every mental state and every mental disorder is a disorder of brain function. Treatments work by altering the structure and function of the brain.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

“We live in a three-dimensional world, and our brains are organized in three dimensions, so we might as well compute in three dimensions. …Right now, chips, even though they're very dense, are flat.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Interview in Macworld magazine (February 2004)
2000s

“Odd that the brain could function on its own, without acquainting him with its purposes, its reasons. But the brain was an organ, like the spleen, heart, kidneys. And they went about their private activities. So why not the brain?”

Philip K. Dick book The Man Who Japed

The Man Who Japed (1956)

“If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.”

David Zindell book Neverness

Lyall Watson
Neverness (1988)

“In 1936 the notion of a computable function was clarified by Turing, and he showed the existence of universal computers that, with an appropriate program, could compute anything computed by any other computer. […] In some subconscious sense even the sales departments of computer manufacturers are aware of this, and they do not advertise magic instructions that cannot be simulated on competitors machines, but only that their machines are faster, cheaper, have more memory, or are easier to program.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

" Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/towards.html", Information Processing 1962: Proceedings of IFIP Congress 62, ed. Cicely M. Popplewell (Amsterdam, 1963), pp. 21–28
1960s

“If you're totally confused, don't worry, it means your brain is functioning normally.”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

Misc

“If you think about things that happen, as being computations... a computation in the sense that it has definite rules... You follow them many steps and you get some result. ...If you look at all these different computations that can happen, whether... in the natural world... in our brains... in our mathematics, whatever else, the big question is how do these computations compare. ...Are there dumb ...and smart computations, or are they somehow all equivalent? ...[T]he thing that I ...was ...surprised to realize from ...experiments ...in the early 90s, and now we have tons more evidence for ...[is] this ...principle of computational equivalence, which basically says that when one of these computations ...doesn't seem like it's doing something obviously simple, then it has reached this ...equivalent layer of computational sophistication of everything. So what does that mean? ...You might say that ...I'm studying this tiny little program ...and my brain is surely much smarter ...I'm going to be able to systematically outrun [it] because I have a more sophisticated computation ...but ...the principle ...says ...that doesn't work. Our brains are doing computations that are exactly equivalent to the kinds of computations that are being done in all these other sorts of systems. ...It means that we can't systematically outrun these systems. These systems are computationally irreducible in the sense that there's no ...shortcut ...that jumps to the answer.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe (Sep 15, 2020)

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