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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) by bart on Friday January 08 2016, @10:19AM

    by bart (2844) on Friday January 08 2016, @10:19AM (#286538)
    There's a pretty good SF book on this topic: The two faces of tomorrow by James Patric Hogan [amazon.com].
    This book explores the evolution of smart systems, where the systems start to create solutions to human orders that no one had foreseen. In order to sort of see where this leads, they set up an experiment in a large satellite, where they deliberately try to provoke the computer systems to see how far it can get.
    The end is quite exciting :-)

  • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday January 08 2016, @12:00PM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Friday January 08 2016, @12:00PM (#286550) Journal

    According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_P._Hogan_(writer)#Novels [wikipedia.org] already a bit older (1979). Found it in an online library as ebook, probably will give it a try, thanks.

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    Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum

  • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday January 08 2016, @07:37PM

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Friday January 08 2016, @07:37PM (#286838)

    I have another book by Hogan (Code of the Lifemaker) that I liked for the unique view. I've been wondering about his other work. I'll check out the one you mentioned, thanks.