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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) by dak664 on Friday January 08 2016, @04:16PM
It would have to interact with the environment in exactly the same way, depleting the same number of neurotransmitters and ions, converting the same amount of ATP producing the same waste products, with identical local heating. A large external machine might be able to do such emulation but for your continuum of consciousness to work you'd basically be replacing have to replace each neuron with an identical clone. Thought is the collective property of a 3D volume of chemical species and electrical potentials, the neurons providing a configurable "skeleton" that steers the volume towards it's gestalt.
That's my take, anyway.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday January 08 2016, @04:27PM
I agree this is hardly a practical proposal. I believe most people would agree that if it was possible to actually perform it, the expectation would be that the behaviour of the resulting cyborg would be indistinguishable from the original person. If anyone disagrees, that would open new discussions, if all agree we can discuss the consequences.
It was more of a thought experiment / philosophical question.
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