Date: 1999

"Thus, in psychology, the computer serves as a model of the mind as conceived by empiricists such as Hume (with the bits as atomic impressions) and idealists such as Kant (with the program providing the rules)."

— Dreyfus, Hubert L. (b. 1929)

Date: 1999

"Thus the view that the brain as a general-purpose symbol-manipulating device operates like a digital computer is an empirical hypothesis which has had its day."

— Dreyfus, Hubert L. (b. 1929)

Date: 1999

"Whether the brain operates like a computer is a strictly empirical question to be settled by neurophysiology."

— Dreyfus, Hubert L. (b. 1929)

Date: 1999

"No such simple answer can be given to the related but quite different question: whether the mind functions like a digital computer, that is, whether one is justified in using a computer model in psychology."

— Dreyfus, Hubert L. (b. 1929)

Date: 1999

"In fact, the same empirical evidence presented for the assumption that the mind functions like a digital computer tends, when considered without making this assumption, to show that the assumption is empirically untenable."

— Dreyfus, Hubert L. (b. 1929)

Date: 1999

"There was always a subject, a "transcendental ego," applying the rules, which simply postponed a scientific theory of behavior by installing a little man (homunculus) in the mind to guide its actions."

— Dreyfus, Hubert L. (b. 1929)

Date: 1999

"Human beings are somehow already situated in such a way that what they need in order to cope with things is distributed around them where they need it, not packed away like a trunk full of objects, or even carefully indexed in a filing cabinet."

— Dreyfus, Hubert L. (b. 1929)

Date: 1999

"In the absence of any empirical or a priori argument that such a formalism for processing physical inputs does or must exist, and given the empirical evidence that the brain functions like an analogue computer, there is no reason to suppose and every reason to doubt that the processing of...

— Dreyfus, Hubert L. (b. 1929)