#turing

The truth, however, is that consciousness is a wonder beyond its own comprehension. Perhaps the universe is nothing more than cold, calculable matter—that, as Galileo posited, “the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics.” But the laws of consciousness are written in language. Indeed, I suspect that rather than language being a development of consciousness it is a precondition of it. More specifically, I would suggest that consciousness and thought emerge from the idea of representation—that it is when we developed the idea that something can be a metaphor for, imitation of, or reference to another thing that we began to think. I would go so far as to say that, in fact, this miraculous imprecision is what thought is.

"A visit to Google on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann's proposal for a digital computer"