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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: 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.