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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: 3, Insightful) by gman003 on Friday January 08 2016, @03:21PM
What do you mean, unfalsifiable? There's an easy experiment to disprove that.
If the non-physical soul is the seat of consciousness, then damage to physical organs should not impair it. So let's go find someone, stick a whisk in their brain and turn their prefrontal cortex into pudding. If they show any impairment in thought or consciousness, then obviously the soul is not involved with at least those parts of intelligence.
Fortunately, we don't have to actually do that. Instead we can just look at accidents involving head injuries... and we find that severe enough brain damage is enough to leave you permanently unconscious. QED souls are not the seat of conscious thought.
Now, people probably won't accept that evidence, but let's not give them the unearned dignity of calling it "unfalsifiable".
(Score: 2) by julian on Friday January 08 2016, @08:21PM
The way they usually get around that is by saying that the body/brain organ are like a computer monitor, the soul is the computer. If you destroy the monitor you can no longer meaningful interact with the computer, but it still exists and functions normally. They just think this "soul" exists in another inaccessible dimension, unlike the computer which is in the same physical reality as the monitor.