Steven Pinker Quotes

The brain can be seen as a complex machine, like a gooey computer.

If it is mind that we are searching the brain, then we are supposing the brain to be much more than a telephone-exchange. We are supposing it to be a telephone-exchange along with subscribers as well.

The human brain has an amazing ability for pattern recognition, sometimes even better than a computer.

I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed.

Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neo-cortex, and the foundation of intelligence.

The brain-mind is not a computer, and regarding it as one has led to a variety of theoretical dead ends.

I think that consciousness has always been the most important topic in the philosophy of mind, and one of the most important topics in cognitive science as a whole, but it had been surprisingly neglected in recent years.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind.

I first got interested in the brain through computers.

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.

The brain has about ten thousand parameters for every second of experience. We do not really have much experience about how systems like that work or how to make them be so good at finding structure in data.

I have always been convinced that the only way to get artificial intelligence to work is to do the computation in a way similar to the human brain. That is the goal I have been pursuing. We are making progress, though we still have lots to learn about how the brain actually works.

I don't think there's anything unique about human intellience. All the nuerons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion.

What's most interesting about trying to figure out AI is the questions that it forces you to ask about the nature of consciousness.

The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.

The computer is not, in our opinion, a good model of the mind, but it is as the trumpet is to the orchestra - you really need it. And so, we have very massive simulations in computers because the problem is, of course, very complex.

I was interested in big unknowns, and the brain is one of the biggest, so building tools that allow us to regard the brain as a big electrical circuit appealed to me.

In my view, while the single neuron is the basic anatomical and information processing-signaling unit of the brain, it is not capable of generating behaviors and, ultimately, thinking. Instead, the true functional unit of the central nervous system is a population of neurons, or neural ensembles or cell assemblies.

I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence.

We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.

A single neuron in the brain is an incredibly complex machine that even today we don't understand. A single 'neuron' in a neural network is an incredibly simple mathematical function that captures a minuscule fraction of the complexity of a biological neuron.

The degree of intelligence that a man or a machine can show depends on many qualities of the ways that knowledge, goals, and problem-solving techniques are represented and put together, and not so much on the fine details.

As someone who was basically a software engineer for many years, I became fascinated with how the brain functions and is put together and works in such a different fashion than computers do.

As a programmer, you're working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.