“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

—  Stephen Hawking

Last update Oct. 1, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for …" by Stephen Hawking?
Stephen Hawking photo
Stephen Hawking 122
British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author 1942–2018

Related quotes

Stephen Hawking photo

“I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

“Creating a modeling language that is also an executable language has long been a goal of the software community. Many years ago, in 1968 to be exact, while working with software components to successfully develop a telecommunications system, we created a modeling language that was the forerunner to UML. To model components we used sequence diagrams, collaboration diagrams, and state transition diagrams (a combination of state charts and activity diagrams). Our modeling language then seamlessly translated the component models into code. Each code component was in its turn compiled into an executable component that was deployed in our computer system. The computer system was a component management system—thus we had "components all the way down."”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Source: Executable Uml: A Foundation for Model-Driven Architecture, 2002, p. xxiii: Foreword.

Steve Jobs photo

“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

Francis Fukuyama photo

“Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google's computers; the Osama bin Laden people can't make their underwear blow up.”

Francis Fukuyama (1952) American political scientist, political economist, and author

On The Colbert Report, May 2, 2011, http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/mon-may-2-2011-francis-fukuyama answering the question of who Americans should be scared of now that bin Laden is dead
2010s

“The title of the book, The Brain as a Computer, is intended to convey something of the methodology involved; the idea is to regard the brain itself as if it were a computer-type control system, in the belief that by so doing we are making explicit what for some time has been implicit in the biological sciences.”

Frank Honywill George (1921–1997) British psychologist

Source: The Brain As A Computer (1962), p.1 as cited in: T. Zetenyi (1988) Fuzzy Sets in Psychology. p.346

Stephen Wolfram photo

“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)

Jeff Hawkins photo

“I do two things: I design mobile computers and I study brains.”

Jeff Hawkins (1957) American entrepreneur and neuroscientist; founder of Palm Computing

Jeff Hawkins at TED2003: "How brain science will change computing" https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_will_change_computing/transcript?utm_content=ted-androidapp&awesm=on.ted.com_d0o6F&utm_medium=on.ted.com-android-share&utm_source=direct-on.ted.com&utm_campaign= (February 2003)

Ward Cunningham photo

“Top down hierarchies make communication work when it is expensive, I hope that wiki can be a flagship in this move in the industry to produce computer support for this kind of work and evolve organizational forms.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

Crucible of Creativity (2005)

Robert J. Marks II photo

“Simulated evolution on a computer works but is no where near the gradual incremental process that is associated with Darwinian evolution. It's closer to dog breeding in terms of its computational complexity.”

Robert J. Marks II (1950) American electrical engineering researcher and intelligent design advocate

In the universe, [besides] space, matter and energy, there is information. [Information hasn't yet] been [well] defined nor studied.
Many times proponents of evolutionary computing … refuse to recognize the contribution of [the programmer's infusion of information] into the process.
Association with ID (intelligent design) in any way is detrimental to one's career. Everybody who works in ID should first have tenure before they come out of the closet.
My comments are as an expert in computational intelligence. I'm not a biologist. For me to talk about the details of biology is as stupid as a British biologist claiming expertise in religion. (A reference to Richard Dawkins.)
Engineers actually design things. This is why [many] engineers are interested in the area of intelligent design
"Well-Informed: Dr. Robert Marks and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab,", From an interview with Casey Luskin of the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute, July 20, 2007, 2010-05-06 http://www.idthefuture.com/2007/07/wellinformed_dr_robert_marks_a.html,

“The objective of the Computer-Aided Design Project is to evolve a machine systems which will permit the human designer and the computer to work together on creative design problems.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: Computer-Aided Design: A Statement of Objectives (1960), p. iii: Abstract.

Related topics