I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.
John Searle
My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.
John Searle
It's difficult to be rigorous about whether a machine really 'knows', 'thinks', etc., because we're hard put to define these things. We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming.
John McCarthy
To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc. No, to be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and the way he understands it.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
The sense in which an automatic door "understands instructions" from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English.
John Searle
Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by the keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable.
Vannevar Bush
Searle, John
Sears, Edmund
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