Dualism and Artificial Intelligence

Descartes’ dualistic view of mind and body is that they are two separate entities in which the mind is immaterial and the body being material. Descartes supports this by assuming,”If we can conceive of one thing without the other, then those two things are different”(90). Furthermore, Descartes’ view holds that humans are not their body, but just their thinking mind essentially because they are distinct from one another. The thinking mind is important for the self to develop and it does not need to body to develop that self. They do affect each other where the mind tells the body what to do, but one can grow to be weak and the other strong at the same time.

hidden humans. In any given session, there would be six imitation games running in parallel, and one given interrogator would meet all five answering machines and five hidden humans. The authors claim that the judges and hidden humans involved all were selected from a wide variety of backgrounds—both male and female, both adults and teenagers, some who already knew about the Turing test beforehand and others who did not. In this paper, the authors examined the data they had acquired in the tests to study what constitutes good machine performance in Turing’s imitation game.

By inventing the Turing Machine, a hypothetical machine which manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules, in 1935, he is widely considered as the father of Artificial Intelligence. He believed that computers would be able to learn and devised the Turing Test, which would text whether a computer was really intelligent. To this day, no computer has passed the test, as yet, and all stored-programme digital computers are modelled on this

Alan Turing is a rare figure amongst the many historical worthies of post-war Britain. He would, at first, seem an unlikely candidate to become a popular, globally recognised icon. He worked within a comparatively novel and arcane scientific field, the central concepts of which are still only fully understood by specialists. It was one which emerged from mostly from his own high-level theoretical reasoning and debating the earlier work of (the similarly obscure) Kurt Gödel upon whether mathematical processes could truly solve any definable problem. 1

It is worth noting that Turing and his concepts first surprisingly cropped up in a mainstream piece of genre defining speculative science fiction relying on real research for ideas six years prior. As Andrew Hodges notes, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick drew upon the concepts in On Computable Numbers and the idea of playing an “Imitation Game” with a virtual intelligence. They created a sinister exploration of the potential for an AI to deceive and kill in the film (later book) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). 9 10

Erin Shoemaker B. Fullingim Composition 2 4 March 2018 The Argument from Consciousness Artificial intelligence is a way of defining intelligence of machines, in contrast to the intelligence of natural creatures like humans and animals. There are multiple theories explaining how machines and computers can think like humans. However, there are many logical objections to this, in which is still a question today. Not only that, if scientists can one day get computers to be as smart or smarter than humans, then what does that mean for the human race?

In Meditation VI, Descartes explains to us what bodies and minds are. He says that bodies are made with a substance that is bound to the laws of nature. In other words, anything that is comprised of matter is considered a “body”. Minds are made of some other immaterial substance that allow for thinking, understanding, deciding, perceiving, doubting, reasoning, etc., and are not bound to the laws of nature. He supports his belief with “[T]here is a great difference between mind and body [our bodies are made of physical matter], inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible [as is all matter], and the mind is entirely indivisible. [ … ] [T]his would be sufficient to teach me that the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body. (Descartes

“The mind-body dualism, in philosophy, is the fact that any theory that the mind and body are distinct kinds of substances or natures. This position implies that mind and body not only differ in meaning, but refer to different kinds of entities (Britannica).” The most basic form of dualism is substance dualism. Substance dualism is the idea that he mind and body are composed of two ontologically distinct substances. According to one who believes and studies dualism, the mind is comprised of a non-physical substance, while the body is constituted of the physical substance, also known as matter. Dualism is closely related to the philosophy of Rene Descartes. Descartes identified the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and distinguished this from the brain. He believed that the brain was the seat of all intelligence. This lead to a great debate over the mind and body. So, ultimately, what is the nature of the mind and consciousness and its relationship to the body?

Sadly, Turing left the National Physical Laboratory, his place of work, before the ACE could be built. After this event, he began working on the concept of artificial intelligence. While working out of manchester, he wrote a philosophical paper that detailed the method you could use to tell whether a computer is thinking, or merely running through data. This process, called the Turing Test, in its simplest form states how a computer in one room must be able to communicate that is it intelligent and convince a human in another room of that(Bunch). But the Turing test is not the method you use

Rene Descartes’ “Discourse on the Method” focuses on distinguishing the human rationale, apart from animals and robots. Wherein, he does so by explaining how neither animals, nor machines possess the same mental faculties as humans. For Descartes distinguishes the human rationale apart from non-humans, even though he does agree the two closely resemble each other because of their sense organs, and physical functions (Descartes, pp22). Nevertheless, it is because the mechanical lacks a necessary aspect of the mind, which consequently separates them from humans. For in Descartes “Discourse on the Method,” he argues that the noteworthy difference between humans, and the mechanical is that machines are only responding to the world through of their sense organs. Whereas humans possess the significant faculties of reasoning, which allows them to understand external inputs and information obtained from the surrounding environment. This significantly creates a dividing ‘line’, which separates humans from non-humans. For in this paper, I will firstly distinguish the differences between the human and mechanical’s mentality in regards to Descartes “Discourse on the Method”. Secondly, I will theorize a modern AI that could possess the concept of an intellectual mind, and then hypothesize a powerful AI that lacks the ability to understand its intelligence. Lastly, in disagreeing in why there are no such machines that is equivalent to the human mind. For humans don’t possess all the

I will support this thesis by taking a few of the objections that were argued against the mindedness of a computer in Turing’s paper, and explaining how they can be modified to allow passing of the test

Alan Turing was a British philosopher who wrote the paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” that discusses about artificial intelligence and the Turing test. In the paper, Alan Turing believes that machines could think however it is complicated to determine if machines or programmed digital computers have that ability to think just like humans. “If the meaning of the words machine and think are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question” (Turing 1). According to Alan Turing, he questions if machines can have the ability to think. In order to determine that machines can think, he tested it by having a machine play the imitation game where a machine has to emulate the behavior of a human. In this game, the interrogator asks

In today’s society, artificial intelligence appears a daunting and frightening area, however this idea was embraced by Turing. He was a pioneer of imitation, that is, the imitation of the human mind in a machine. The perspectives of Turing with regards to artificial intelligence were new and original, nobody had questioned whether or not a machine can think or likened one to the human mind. It is important to remember that artificial intelligence is only an attempt at recreating the human machine, as Turing put it, which is the mind. In 1942, Turing was quoted saying: “We do not wish to penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalise a man for losing in a race against an aeroplane” which demonstrates one of Turing’s key perspectives. Man and machine are going to be different, an attempt at copying the human mind, will not yield a human, but a machine, reinforcing the fact that artificial intelligence is only an attempt to imitate the mind. A paper, written by Turing, outlines an “imitation test,” a test which contrasts the power of the human mind to that of a machine. This test was developed by Turing in order to help the public grasp the concept of an artificial intelligence: it precedes as follows. A participant is asked to take part in two conversations, one of which is with a machine, the other with a human. Now imagine if the participant was unable to decide which was the machine and which was human. Turing

The mind, by contrast, is unextended, has no location in space and is indivisible. Body and mind have a different essential, defining properties: bodies are extended, but do not think; minds think but are not extended. Descartes argued that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland. This from of duality proposes that the mind controls the body, but that the body can also influence the otherwise rational mind, such as when people act out of passion. I think that Descartes has many strengths throughout his work, but he doesn’t show any proof to it all.

On his essay “Can machines think?” Alan Turing, a great mathematician, and creator of the Turing Test presents us with the initial concept of what is now considered artificial intelligence. He states that eventually, as time progresses, machines will be able to think like humans. But, can a machine really think like a human? Can a machine even think on its own, or it is just based on human science and engineering to make computer systems perform tasks that require intelligence when done by humans?