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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @12:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @12:50PM (#286560)

    If mind is generated by the brain, yes. If mind is not generated by the brain, and is external to it, then a machine built in the likeness of human brain would surely attract such an external mind to live in, i think. (lol)

    I tend to think consciousness is an emergent property, if not simply what a converged neural architecture feels like to YOU when its implementing YOU...?

    There was this dude, manuel dellanda or something, who wrote this book, war in the age of intelligent machines.. lemme find a link

    http://monoskop.org/images/c/c0/DeLanda_Manuel_War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines.pdf [monoskop.org] which is a discourse analysis of the war machinery over the times. Theres a summary of it on wikipedia.

    "He draws on chaos theory to show how the biosphere reaches singularities (or bifurcations) which mark self-organization thresholds where emergent properties are displayed and claims that the "mecanosphere", constituted by the machinic phylum, possesses similar qualities. "

    So some people argue that thinking machines already exist, its just that they use humans for components they yet do not have? that is how i understood that book, anyway...