From the conclusion of Edwin Boring (1946), "Mind and mechanism" [1], which is an exposition of the philosophical value of operationalist methods in psychology:
I believe that robotic thinking helps precision of psychological thought, and will continue to help it until psychophysiology is so far advanced that an image is nothing other than a neural event, and object constancy is obviously just something that happens in the brain. That time is still a long way off, and in the interval I choose to sit cozily with my robot, squeezing his hand and feeling a thrill -- a scientist's thrill -- when he squeezes mine back again.