Abstract
The purpose of this article is to show why consciousness and thought are not manifested in digital computers. Analyzing the rationale for claiming that the formal manipulation of physical symbols in Turing machines would emulate human thought, the article attempts to show why this proved false. This is because the reinterpretation of ‘designation’ and ‘meaning’ to accommodate physical symbol manipulation eliminated their crucial functions in human discourse. Words have denotations and intensional meanings because the brain transforms the physical stimuli received from the microworld into a qualitative, macroscopic representation for consciousness. Lacking this capacity as programmed machines, computers have no representations for their symbols to designate and mean. Unlike human beings in which consciousness and thought, with their inherent content, have emerged because of their organic natures, serial processing computers or parallel distributed processing systems, as programmed electrical machines, lack these causal capacities.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alt, F.L. (1960), Advances in Computers, Vol. I. New York: Academic Press.
Bar-Hillel, Y. (1960), ‘The present status of automatic translation of languages,’ in: ed. F.L. Alt. Advances in Computers, Vol. I.
Churchland, P.M. (1979), Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Churchland, P.M. (1988), Matter and Consciousness, revised ed. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Churchland, P.S. (1986), Neurophilosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Cowan, J.D. and Sharp, D.H. (1988), Real Brains and Artificial Intelligence. in: ed. S.R. Graubard, The Artificial Intelligence Debate.
Davies, P. (1984), God & The New Science, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Dawkins, R. (1987), The Blind Watchmaker, New York: W.W. Norton.
Dreyfus, H.L. and Dreyfus, S.E. (1988), ‘Making a mind versus modeling the brain: artificial intelligence back at a branchpoint,’ in: (ed). S.R. Graubard, The Artificial Intelligence Debate.
Dreyfus, H.L. (1992), What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gardner, H. (1974), The Shattered Mind, New York: Vintage Books.
Gell-Mann, M. (1994), The Quark and the Jaguar, New York: W.H. Freeman & Co.
Graubard, S.R. (ed.) (1988), The Artificial Intelligence Debate, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gregory, R.L. (1981), Mind In Science, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Haugeland, J. (ed.) (1981), Mind Design, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Haugeland, J. (1985), Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hebb, D.O. (1949), The Organization of Behavior, New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Hobbes, T. (1958), Leviathan, New York: Library of Liberal Arts.
Hofstadter, D.R. and Dennett, D.C. (1981), The Mind's I, New York: Basic Books.
Lauria, A.R. (1972), The Man with a Shattered World, trans. by Lynn Solotaroff, New York: Basic Books.
McCulloch, W.S. and Pitts, W.H. (1943), ‘A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity,’ Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5: pp. 115.
McGinn, C. (1991), The Problem of Consciousness, Oxford: Blackwell's.
Minsky, M. and Papert, S. (1969), Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Nagel, T. (1974), ‘What it is like to be a bat?’ The Philosophical Review 83: 435–450.
Newell, A. and Simon, H.S. (1958), ‘Heuristic problem solving: the next advance in operations research.’ Operations Research (January-February) 6, in: (ed.), S.R. Graubard, The Artificial Intelligence Debate.
Newell, A. and Simon, H.S. (1976), ‘Computer science as empirical inquiry: symbols and search.’ Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 19: pp. 113–126, in: (ed.) J. Haugeland, Mind Design, 1981.
Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, I. (1984), Order Out Of Chaos, New York: Bantom Books.
Reek, G.N. and Edelman, G.M. (1988), ‘Real Brains and Artificial Intelligence,’ in: (ed.) S.R. Graubard. The Artificial Intelligence Debate.
Rosenblatt, F. (1958a), ‘The perceptron, A probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain,’ Psychological Review 62: 386.
Rosenblatt, F. (1958b), Mechanization of Thought Processes: Proceedings of a Symposium held at the National Physical Laboratory. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1: 449, in: (ed.) S.R. Graubard, The Artificial Intelligence Debate.
Rumelhart, D.E. and McClelland, J.L. and the PDP Research Group (1986), ‘Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition,’ Vol. I., Cambridge: MIT Press.
Russell, S. and Norvig, P. (1995), ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach’, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Sarton, G. (1959), A History of Science, Vol. II, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Schlagel, R. (1977), ‘The mind-brain identity impasse,’ American Philosophical Ouarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3.
Schlagel, R. (1986), Contextual Realism: A Meta-Physical Framework for Modern Science, New York: Paragon House.
Searle, J.R. (1980), ‘Mind, brains, and programs.’ The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: pp. 417–457, in: (ed.) D.R. Hofstadter and D.C. Dennett, The Mind's Eye, 353–373.
Searle, J.R. (1983), Intentionality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J.R. (1992), The Rediscovery of Mind, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Sokolowski, R. (1988), ‘Natural and artificial intelligence,’ in: (ed.), S.R. Graubard, The Artificial Intelligence Debate.
Tarski, A. (1944), ‘The semantic conception of truth,’ Philosophy and Phnomenological Research, 4.
Time (1997), ‘IBM OWES MANKIND A REMATCH.’
Turing, A.M. (1950), ‘Computing machinery and intelligence.’ Mind LIX: 234, in: (ed.) D.R. Hofstadter and D.C. Dennett, The Mind's Eye.
Weinberg, S. (1992), Dreams of a Final Theory, New York: Random House.
Winograd, T. (1972), Understanding Natural Language, New York: Academic Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1961), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by D.F Pears and B.F. McGuinness, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958), Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schlagel, R.H. Why not Artificial Consciousness or Thought?. Minds and Machines 9, 3–28 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008374714117
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008374714117