ABSTRACT
There are two related ideas concerning men and machines. The first is that machines can be built with the same functional capacities as men; the second is that men are not only like, but really are, complex machines. Although the machine model of man is not paraded so obviously in the nineteenth century the human organism, including the brain, is already being treated scientifically by physiologists as a machine. In the progress of the man-machine analogy to date, the development of the modern computer has led to the conception of the nervous system as a type of general-purpose computer. There are a number of obvious differences between the brain and the present generation of digital computers. Despite recent advances, the size of components in the computer is still much greater than in the brain, and there are fewer of them, but the speed with which they function is far greater.
