The price you pay for following Searle’s advice is that you get all your phenomena, the events and things that have to be explained by your theory, through a channel designed not for scientific investigation but for handy, quick-and-dirty use in the rough and tumble of time-pressured life. You can learn a lot about how the brain does it—you can learn quite a lot about computers by always insisting on the desktop point of view, after all—but only if you remind yourself that your channel is systematically oversimplified and metaphorical, not literal. That means you must resist the alluring
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