Can Machines Think?
Edited by Eric Dietrich (State University of New York at Binghamton)
About this topic
Summary | This category is about whether or not computers, robots, and software agents can literally be said to think. Humans think, chimps think, dogs think, cats and birds think. But do computers? Is your computer thinking now? Perhaps only specially programmed computers think? Or perhaps only computers with special hardware can think -- hardware that resembles the neurons of the brain, for example. If computers can be made to think, then does that mean that humans are a kind of robot and their brains a kind of computer -- a neurocomputer, say? One of the deeper issues here is that the term "thinking" is ambiguous in at least two ways: It can include being conscious of one's environment (surroundings), one's personal feelings and thoughts, etc., or it can mean cogitate, learn, plan, and solve problems, where these latter terms pick out mental events that may or may not be conscious. |
Key works | The idea that machines could think occurred to the very first computer builders and programmers. See, e.g., Alan Turing's great paper Turing 1950. The term "artificial intelligence" (AI) goes back to a summer conference in held 1956 at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Many AI pioneers took it for granted that within a decade or two computers would be as intelligent as humans. A central paper from this time is McCarthy & Hayes 1969. Another crucial paper is Putnam's Putnam 1960. But the optimism proved to be unjustified. The decades came and went without machines achieving human-level intelligence. Soon several philosophers and other researchers argued that computers would never think and that human brains and minds were completely different from computers. The most important paper in this push-back was John Searle's famous paper: Searle 1980, where he argues that machines cannot think at all because they lack the proper semantical connection to the world. Summaries and replies to Searle's paper accompany it in the same journal issue (Searle 1980). Also, a summary of Searle's anti-AI argument and many replies to it can be found in Dietrich 1994. Another form of attack on AI came from Lucas 1961, who argued that Godel's famous Incompleteness Theorems showed that machines could not think. This theme was reinvigorated by Roger Penrose in his well-known book Penrose 1989. Yet another form of attack on AI came from Fodor 1987. All of these attacks on AI spawned a large literature trying to refute them, agreeing with them, or amending them. To this day, it is not known whether or not machines (computers) can think, nor if humans are machines. Nevertheless, the effort to build intelligent machines continues, and this is probably the best way to answer the question. |
Introductions | See Searle 1980 and the associated replies for a good introduction to the issues surrounding Searle's attack on AI. For some good history of AI, which raises many important issues, see Pamela McCorduck's McCorduck 2004 and Daniel Crevier's AI: The Tumultuous Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993). |
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Related categories
Subcategories: See also:
The Turing Test (467)
The Chinese Room (268)
Machine Consciousness (356)
Machine Mentality, Misc (314)
- Thought and Thinking (474 | 255)
- Machine Functionalism (46)
- Philosophy of Cognitive Science (111,309)
- Machine Consciousness (356)
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