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What Does it Mean to Think and Could a Machine Ever Do it?

posted by n1 on Friday January 08 2016, @08:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the something-to-think-about dept.

AnonTechie writes:

The idea of a thinking machine is an amazing one. It would be like humans creating artificial life, only more impressive because we would be creating consciousness. Or would we ? It's tempting to think that a machine that could think would think like us. But a bit of reflection shows that's not an inevitable conclusion.

To begin with, we'd better be clear about what we mean by "think". A comparison with human thinking might be intuitive, but what about animal thinking? Does a chimpanzee think? Does a crow? Does an octopus ?

The philosopher Thomas Nagel said that there was "something that it is like" to have conscious experiences. There's something that it is like to see the colour red, or to go water skiing. We are more than just our brain states.

Could there ever be "something that it's like" to be a thinking machine? In an imagined conversation with the first intelligent machine, a human might ask "Are you conscious?", to which it might reply, "How would I know?".

http://theconversation.com/what-does-it-mean-to-think-and-could-a-machine-ever-do-it-51316

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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @09:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @09:08AM (#286516)

    Humans can think?

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ticho on Friday January 08 2016, @09:10AM

    by ticho (89) on Friday January 08 2016, @09:10AM (#286517) Homepage Journal

    They can, they just usually choose not to.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by sudo rm -rf on Friday January 08 2016, @04:01PM

      by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Friday January 08 2016, @04:01PM (#286661) Journal

      One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical.

      -- Douglas Adams

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Friday January 08 2016, @11:51PM

      by aristarchus (2645) on Friday January 08 2016, @11:51PM (#287001) Journal

      Bertrand Russell:

      most people would die sooner than think – in fact they do so.

  • (Score: 2) by khchung on Friday January 08 2016, @09:16AM

    by khchung (457) on Friday January 08 2016, @09:16AM (#286522)

    Good point, really.

    Show me how one can conclude a human is "conscious", then we can ask how would we know if a machine could do it.

    I.e. what is the test one can devise to show that any given human is "conscious"?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @10:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @10:04AM (#286536)

    Well, at least they think so.