Machine Intelligence
Computers beat the best human chess players. Computers guide spacecraft over vast distances and direct robotic devices to explore faraway astronomical bodies. Computers outpace humans in many respects, but are they actually intelligent? Can they think? Even if one is skeptical about the mentality of today's computers, the interesting philosophical issue remains: Might computers possess significant intelligence someday? Indeed, might computers feel or even have consciousness? And, how would we know?
The Historical Debate
These issues of machine intelligence are not new to philosophy. The debate about whether a machine might think has its philosophical roots in the seventeenth and eighteenth century with the development of modern science. If the universe is fundamentally materialistic and mechanistic, as the emerging scientific paradigm suggested, it would follow that humans are nothing more than machines. Possibly, other machines might be constructed that would be capable of thought as well. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who advocated a materialistic, mechanistic view, argued that reasoning is reckoning and nothing more. Humans reason by calculation with signs involving addition, subtraction, and other mathematical operations. Hobbes took these signs to be material objects that have significance as linguistic symbols. Julien La Mettrie (1709–1751), another materialist and mechanist, speculated that it might be possible to teach a language to apes and to build a mechanical man that could talk.
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