Can Machines Think?: Can Machines Think?

Question 1: Turing offers his test in place of the question, “Can machines think?” Are there other tests that he could have offered just as well, for example, “Can machines play chess?” In fact, machines can now play chess much better than any human. Why wouldn’t Turing take this as an adequate proof that machines can think? Should we?

A machine that can beat a human in chess has effectively passed a Turing-like test in this category. It is easy to imagine that, even if one was a grandmaster, if one played a game of chess over the Internet and knew that the opponent had world-class ability, it would be impossible to know whether the other player was a human or a computer. The machine has replicated human output to the point where human and

Mental states are said to be functional states realized within an internal machine. Putnam uses a Turing machine to further explore this idea. The mind is like a finite state digital computer with a machine table that processes its given inputs with respect to its current state and then returns the appropriate output. Putnam argues that a mind, however, differs slightly from a Turing machine, because the mind is a probabilistic automaton, interpreting the probabilities of states and inputs, and responding with the corresponding output that makes the most sense in the given situation. This goes beyond any notion of any particular temperament. It is not just the input that matters, but also the state the system is at when that input occurs that determines the probability of any

It posits a girl named Mary who grows up in an all black and white room, but over the years, learns everything there is to know about how color works from books on neurophysiology, vision, and electromagnetics. If one day she is let outside and finally sees color for the first time, would she learn something new? A physicalist would say, “No, the mental states of understanding color are already related to the physical states in her brain.” The physicalist would contend that she learns nothing new because she has already fully learned the concept of color. But intuitively, most people would say that Mary would be learning something new. She would finally be able to feel what it is like to experience color and take part in the overwhelming qualia. A functionalist could step in and understand this as a qualia being represented as a newly experienced functional state that can relate to the other functional states already created through book learning. If functionalism is correct in this description and there is some new state that exists outside the brain states that already existed, then type physicalism’s description must be