Our minds are not our physical brains, but the cultural software running on them

From The Software of Civilization by J. Storrs Hall.

A single human is not really an effective thinking machine. A feral child who manages to survive in the absence of language-speaking elders winds up not being able to learn language at all. Of all the ideas, concepts, thoughts, and so forth we use individually, only a tiny fraction are original. Almost everything we know, everything we are, is absorbed from the culture around us.

In very strong sense, our minds are not our physical brains, but the cultural software running on them. Although there is an element of the personal in memories and aptitudes, by and large the same software would run as well on someone else’s physical brain. Or, when we figure out a bit more about it, on a computer.