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Updated on Apr 06, 18
Created on Jul 31, 11
Category: Computers & Internet
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Len Yabloko's List: Can computers think?
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Jul 31, 11
February 21, 2001
The complexities of the mind mirror the challenges of Artificial Intelligence. This article discusses the nature of thought itself-can it be replicated in a machine? From Ray Kurzweil's revolutionary book The Age of Intelligent Machines, published in 1990.-
Consider a living cell. The individual enzymes, lipids, and DNA molecules that go to make up a cell are comparatively simple things. They obey well-understood laws of physics and chemistry.
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One way to answer that last question is with another question: Do we really want to know? Many people instinctively side with Searle, horrified at what the computationalist position implies: If thought, feeling, intuition, and all the other workings of the mind can be understood even in principle, if we are machines, then God is not speaking to our hearts. And for that matter, neither is Mozart. The soul is nothing more than the activations of neuronal symbols. Spirit is nothing more than a surge of hormones and neurotransmitters. Meaning and purpose are illusions. And besides, when machines grow old and break dawn, they are discarded without a thought. Thus, for many people, AI is a message of despair. Of course, this is hardly a new concern. For those who choose to see it that way, science itself is a message of despair.
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“A Deep Blue victory, was a watershed event, but it doesn’t have to do with computers becoming intelligent… My god, I used to think playing chess required thought. Now I realize it doesn’t. ” – Douglas Hofstader , 1997
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Jul 31, 11
Just as in the Thinking Matter controversy of the 17th and 18th centuries, most of this modern discussion has tended to be entirely aprioristic, as though questions about the possibilities of computing machines can be fully understood without any experience of implementing them or their resulting behaviour.
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Pure thought experiments - without any possibility of detailed analysis or genuine experimentation - can be quite hopeless in these circumstances. To illustrate with a parody of Searle's line of argument, we might argue like this:
Imagine that I were to write a 100-line computer program that conversed in perfect English, in such a way as to pass the Turing Test. Surely we wouldn't call such a simple program genuinely "intelligent". Hence passing the Turing Test cannot be sufficient for genuine intelligence.
The obvious fallacy here is that no 100-line computer program could possibly be anything like that powerful, so the hypothetical experiment is useless. And likewise, it might be suggested, there is no value in trying to draw conclusions about possibilities from a pure thought experiment like Searle's Chinese Room, until we have some appreciation of what sort of processing would be required to make it feasible.
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Jul 31, 11
Hubert Dreyfus Wrote What Computers Can't Do
Turing conjectured that a machine with 1GB of memory could pass this test in 2000, but he was wrong.
History of the Stored-Program Computer from 1800 Jacquard Loom and Babbage's Analytical Engine -
Aug 14, 11
The term cognition is used in several different loosely related ways. In psychology it is used to refer to the mental processes of an individual, with particular relation to a view that argues that the mind has internal mental states (such as beliefs, desires and intentions) and can be understood in terms of information processing, especially when a lot of abstraction or concretization is involved, or processes such as involving knowledge, expertise or learning for example are at work.
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Cognition is commonly known as Thinking
What Is Thinking???
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- For finding answers to questions
- For finding solutions to problems
- For finding facts and exploring reality
Thinking is the process whereby these mental representations are manipulated. The process of thinking transforms these representations into a new and different form. The transformation may be made:
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Apr 06, 18
"“Sometimes philosophers clutch an insupportable hypothesis to their bosoms and run headlong over the cliff edge,” Dennett writes in a 1995 essay, “The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies: Commentary on Moody, Flanagan, and Polger,” in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. “Then, like cartoon characters, they hang there in midair, until they notice what they have done and gravity takes over.” I agree with Dennett about this, and about much else (including Darwin and religion), but here, his image in incomplete. The trouble with philosophers is that gravity doesn’t take over. They continue to cycle in midair, legs a-blur."
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