Can Computers Think Will We Think

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Can Computers think? Will they ever be able to think? I do not really have answers to these questions. In this essay I am not going to be able to tell you the answer, or pick a side myself, because I strongly believe that either side could be right. However, in this essay I will convince you that regardless of computers thinking or not, humans do think and process ideas through the same ways that they do. I will be doing this through the computational theory of the mind test by Alan Turing, and the counter thought-experiment of Turing’s test by John Searle I will be able to show you this fact.

When speaking about whether a computer (artificial intelligence) can think, I will be referring to the word think as having a brain that can compute …show more content…

They rely on their syntax (the initial agreed upon ‘grammar’) and not their semantics (the constructed ‘grammar’ agreed upon by a culture). A good example of this is apple (the fruit), and apple (the electronic company) both having the same syntax but can be used two very different ways. He states if a computer thinks in algorithms such as this and the computational theory of the mind is such, there is no reason a computer cannot have the same type of thinking as we do. His test called the “Imitation game” involved having a person, a machine and, a human interrogator in three separate rooms. The interrogator must ask questions all written down, to determine which person is in fact a person. If the computer convinces the interrogator he is a person, Turing insists this means computers are just as intelligent as humans? Although, no computer has passed the test yet, Turing believes the fact that they can come close and one day will be able to means they have the capabilities to think as we do.

John Searle’s counter theory to Turing’s test is an also very well recognized thought-experiment called the Chinese Room. He is in a room with a manual that explains to him how to respond to words or sentences passed to him on a piece of paper underneath a door. He speaks no Chinese but using the manual can think of responsive sentences to pass to a person on the other side, which cause him to seem as though he speaks perfect Chinese. He says he does this using the manual “for manipulating symbols and numerals (just as a computer does).”

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