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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
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(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday January 08 2016, @02:43PM
That's not how I view metaphysics. I view the actual laws of physics to be as much physical as axioms of mathematics to be mathematical. The approximations to the actual laws of physics (which can always be reduced to just one law, through trivial means) which we study, represent, and test, and our agreement on how we study, represent, and test (reality against) them - that's the metaphysics.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves