 Apart from Haugeland’s claim that processors understand program instructions, Searle’s critics can agree that computers no more understand syntax than they understand semantics, although, like all causal engines, a computer has syntactic descriptions. And while it is often useful to programmers to treat the machine as if it performed syntactic operations, it is not always so: sometimes the characters programmers use are just switches that make the machine do something, for example, make a given pixel on the computer display turn red, or make a car transmission shift gears. Thus it is not clear that Searle is correct when he says a digital computer is just “a device which manipulates symbols”. Computers are complex causal engines, and syntactic descriptions are useful in order to structure the causal interconnections in the machine. AI programmers face many tough problems, but one can hold that they do not have to get semantics from syntax. If they are to get semantics, they must get it from causality.