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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
[Related Video]: They're Made Out of Meat
(Score: 3, Interesting) by moo kuh on Friday January 08 2016, @10:04AM
There is some interesting neurology (I am not a neurologist) research being done on how the brain stores and uses information:
https://www.google.com/search?q=chunking+neurology&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US&client=palemoon [google.com]
http://neurosciencenews.com/motor-chunking-sensorimotor-putaman-frontoparietal-cortex/ [neurosciencenews.com]
I would say yes, machines can "think". I'll speculate that human thinking is nothing more than the brain running the biological equivalent of pattern matching algorithms on information it has stored. I think thinking boils down to either re-arranging how information is stored and/or searching through it with pattern matching algorithms. Lets say a human is trying to answer a question. When an answer is not found, the decision tree could choose the closest match if it is good enough. If the match isn't close enough, it could decide to admit defeat, seek more information, or refactor its database and try again. The decision of whether to accept the best match or not could be weighted by the importance of the question, information available, and time available. The decision taken when not accepting the current best match could be decided by importance of the question, information available, and time available. Those two decision trees sound a lot like a greedy algorithm. Our brains' way of searching its information could be nothing more than meat space breadth first or depth first graph searches.
If human thinking is nothing more than running the meat space version of regular expressions or SQL queries, storing new information, and refactoring, then there is no reason a non-biological machine can't do it. Our brains just have really good compression, database refactoring, and pattern matching algorithms.
I admit I have speculated a lot, but hopefully some of you will find my thoughts interesting.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @03:35PM
All my thinking to this point leads me to conclude that the human brain is a "Story Engine" ... where the minimal story is the metaphor. Pattern matching is done by comparing stories. Outcomes are predicted based on outcomes of known stories.
As far as I can determine, no one is using this realization in the AI field. Computationally intensive comparison of individual facts seems to be the direction of development. I'm curious about what a Story Engine approach to AI might produce.
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Friday January 08 2016, @10:07PM
Jeff Hawkins has something like this he calls Hierarchical Temporal Memory. He has a great book called On Intelligence.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday January 08 2016, @03:54PM
And yes, that means I too think that machines will eventually think. We've had less than a century working seriously on the problem, and technology shows no signs of running out of new paths for potential improvement. I'm perfectly prepared to not see anything in my lifetime, but I'm sure in a few more centuries cyborgs will be laughing at how naive we 20th century meat machines were.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday January 08 2016, @11:57PM
I'll speculate that human thinking is nothing more than the brain running the biological equivalent of pattern matching algorithms on information it has stored.
Puny human! We superior thinking things find your thoughtless speculations quite amusing! Meat that thinks! Ha! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ [youtube.com]They're Made of Meat