Abstract
The question whether or not computers can think was first asked in print by Alan Turing in his seminal 1950 article. In order to avoid defining what a computer is or what thinking is, Turing resorts to “the imitation game” which is a test that allows us to determine whether or not a machine can think. That is, if an interrogator is unable to tell whether responses to his questions come from a human being or from a machine, the machine is imitating a human being so well that it has to be acknowledged that these responses result from its thinking. However, then as now, it is not an indisputable claim that machines could think, and an unceasing stream of papers discussing the validity of the test proves this point. There are many arguments in favour of, as well as against, the claims borne by the test, and Turing himself discusses some of them. In his view, there are mice possible objections to the concept of a thinking machine, which he eventually dismisses as weak, irrelevant, or plain false. However, as he admits, he can present “no very convincing arguments of a positive nature to support my views. If I had I should not have taken such pains to point out the fallacies in contrary views”.
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Notes
Alan Turing,Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind 59 (1950), pp. 433–60; reprinted in Alan R. Anderson (ed.), Minds and machines, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1964, p. 25.
David Anderson,Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems: The Implications, Chichester: Horwood 1989, p. 29.
There were some attempts to capture this ability in interlingua, but the results were very modest.
This point was stressed in the past by Joseph Weizenbaum and John Searle, and recently by Gerald M. Edelman in his Bright air, brilliant fire: On the matter of mind, New York: Basic Books 1992, p. 225.
James H. Moor,An Analysis of the Turing Test, Philosophical Studies 30 (1976), p. 249.
Douglas F. Stalker,Why Machines Can't Think: A Reply to James Moor, Philosophical Studies 34 (1978), p. 319.
Cf. Michael Scriven,The Mechanical Concept of Mind, in Anderson,, p. 39.
Cf. Nicholas Humphrey,A History of the Mind, New York: Simon & Schuster 1992, p. 210.
Roger Penrose,The Emperor's New Mind, New York: Penguin Books 1991, pp. 8–9.
Larry Crockett,The Turing Test and the Frame Problem: AI's Mistaken Understanding of Intelligence, Norwood: Ablex 1992, p. 203.
, p. 257.
To run Windows on today's PCs, at least 4MB memory is required, which exceeds Turing's requirements by the factor of 34.
Chris Fields,Human Computer Interaction: A Critical Synthesis, Social Epistemology 1 (1987), p. 18.
p. 24, note 71.
Already Turing himself called his game a test, “our test”, p. 18.
Terrell W. Bynum,Artificial Intelligence, Biology, and Intentional States, Metaphilosophy 16 (1985), p. 365.
Cf. the following observation: “The task of cognitive science could then be understood as that of determining which Turing machines are the intelligent ones, and, among those, which are the humanly intelligent ones and which, e.g., is you at four years of age, which you at forty, etc.”, Justin Leiber, The light bulb and the Turing-tested machine, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 22 (1992), p. 31.
Paul Ziff,The Feelings of Robots, in Anderson,, p. 102.
Cf. also my paper,Programmabilism: A New Reductionism, Epistemologia 13 (1990), pp. 235–250 and my book, Moral dimension of man in the age of computers, Lanham: University of America Press 1995, ch. 1.
Keith Gunderson,Mentality and Machines, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1985, p. 81.
O.H. Schmitt,The Design of Machines to Simulate the Behavior of the Human Brain, IRE National Convention, Symposium 1955, p. 255.
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Drozdek, A. What if computers could think?. AI & Soc 9, 389–395 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01210589
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01210589