27 February 2006

Monday Quote Cogitation #1 - Searle

The intelligent design crowd are fond of body components that give the impression of being machines, whose purposes are manifested in their ‘designs’. What would they do with this quote from John Searle, from The Mystery of Consciousness?
I, for one, am always amazed by the specificity of biological systems, and, in the case of the brain, the specificity takes a form you could not have predicted just from knowing what it does. If you were designing an organic machine to pump blood you might come up with something like a heart, but if you were designing a machine to produce consciousness, who would think of a hundred billion neurons?

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