When there's a will to fail, obstacles can be found. - John McCarthy

It's difficult to be rigorous about whether a machine really 'knows', 'thinks', etc., because we're hard put to define these things. We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming.

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

[This] is or should be our main scientific activity — studying the structure of information and the structure of problem solving processes independently of applications and independently of its realization in animals or humans.