But then she had asked, in all seriousness, how we could really know what was going on inside of another mind—be it a biological brain or a digital simulation. We took speech and other forms of communication for granted. Computer geeks tended to see those as add-on modules, separate from the brain per se—peripheral devices that could be plugged in, like a microphone or a printer, when some input or output was desirable. Brain scientists considered the input and the output as more fundamental, woven into the neural fabric of the brain.
