William Daniel Hillis

“I etch a pattern of geometric shapes onto a stone. To the uninitiated, the
shapes look mysterious and complex, but I know that when arranged
correctly they will give the stone a special power, enabling it to respond to
incantations in a language no human being has ever spoken. ...Yet my work involves no witchcraft. The stone
is a wafer of silicon, and the incantations are software. The patterns etched on
the chip and the programs that instruct the computer may look complicated
and mysterious, but they are generated according to a few basic principles
that are easily explained.”
― William Daniel Hillis

“It is certainly conceivable, as at least one well-known physicist has speculated (to hoots from most of his colleagues), that the human brain takes advantage of quantum mechanical effects. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that this is the case. Certainly, the physics of a neuron depends on quantum mechanics, just as the physics of a transistor does, but there is no evidence that neural processing takes place at the quantum mechanical level as opposed to the classical level; that is, there is no evidence that quantum mechanics is necessary to explain human thought. As far as we know, all the relevant computational properties of a neuron can be simulated on a conventional computer. If this is indeed the case, then it is also possible to simulate a network of tens of billions of such neurons, which means, in turn, that the brain can be simulated on a universal machine. Even if it turns out that the brain takes advantage of quantum computation, we will probably learn how to build devices that take advantage of the same effects—in which case it will still be possible to simulate the human brain with a machine.”
― William Daniel Hillis, The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work