- “How can brain processes cause consciousness?” — philosophers and even some scientists think that the relation cannot be causal because that would imply some version of Dualism of the brain and Consciousness.
- The physics of implementing medium — that is, the actual physical-electrical-chemical properties of the computer in front of you — are irrelevant to computation.
- The third step of the Chinese Room Argument demonstrates that following a program does not imply understanding:
- Manipulating formal symbols is not in and of itself constitutive of having semantic contents, nor is it sufficient by itself to guarantee the presence of semantic contents.
- You cannot milk semantics out of syntactical processes alone.
- The brain is a biological machine and it can think therefore at least some machines can think, furthermore human brains sometimes compute. On one definition of a computer, brains are computers because they compute.
- You could discover computational processes in nature independently of human interpretation because any physical process you might find is computational only relative to some interpretation.
- Computation is not a machine process such as neuron firing or internal combustion; it is an abstract mathematical process that exists only relative to conscious observers and interpreters.
- The brain is an organ like any other; it is an organic machine. Consciousness is caused by lower-level neuronal processes in the brain and is itself a feature of the brain.
- Because it is a feature that emerges from certain neuronal activities, we can think of it as an “Emergent Property” of the brain.