Abstract
It has been roughly 60 years since Turing wrote his famous article on the question, “Can machines think?” His answer was that the ability to converse would be a good indication of a thinking computer. This procedure can be understood as an abductive inference: That a computer could converse like a human being would be explained if it had a mind. Thus, Turing’s solution can be viewed as a solution to the other-minds problem, the problem of knowing that minds exist other than your own, applied to the special case of digital computers. In his response, Turing assumed that thinking is a matter of running a given program, not having a special kind of body, and that the development of a thinking program could be achieved in a simulated environment. Both assumptions have been undermined by recent developments in Cognitive Science, such as neuroscience and robotics. The physical details of human brains and bodies are indivisible from the details of human minds. Furthermore, the ability and the need of human beings to interact with their physical and social environment are crucial to the nature of the human mind. I argue that a more plausible solution to Turing’s question is an analogical abduction: An attribution of minds to computers that have bodies and ecological adaptations akin to those of human beings. Any account of human minds must take these factors into consideration. Any account of non-human minds should take human beings as a model, if only because we are best informed about the human case.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
AAAI (n.d.) Tributes. American Association for Artificial Intelligence, http://www.aaai.org/aitopics/retired/html/tributes.html (retrieved April 22, 2009)
Brooks, R.A.: Intelligence without reason. In: Myopoulos, R., Reiter, J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 569–595. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo (1991)
Brooks, R.A.: Rodney Brooks forecasts the future. New Scientist 2578 (2006)
Clark, A., Chalmers, D.: The extended mind. Analysis 58(1), 7–19 (1998)
Cook, J.W.: Did Wittgenstein practise what he preached? Philosophy 81(3), 445–462 (2006)
Damasio, A.: Descartes’ Error. G.P. Putnam, New York (1994)
Dautenhahn, K.: Getting to know each other – Artificial social intelligence for autonomous robots. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 16(2-4), 333–356 (1995)
Descartes, R.: Discourse on the Method. Mclean, I. (trans.), vol. 1637, Oxford University Press, Oxford (2006)
Descartes, R.: Meditations on First Philosophy. Rev. ed. J. Cottingham (trans.). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1641/1996)
Epstein, R., Roberts, G., Beber, G. (eds.): Parsing the Turing test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Springer, Gronigen (2008)
Gabbey, A.: Reflections on the other-minds problem: Descartes and others. In: Israel, D.S. (ed.) Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews, pp. 59–69. E.J. Brill, Leiden (1990)
Ganapati, P.: Cognitive computing project aims to reverse-engineer the mind (Feburary 6, 2009), http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/02/cognitive-compu/ (retrieved May 6, 2009)
Harnad, S.: Other bodies, other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem. Minds and Machines 1(1), 43–54 (1991)
Kurthen, M., Moskopp, D., Linke, D.B., Reuter, B.M.: The locked-in syndrome and the behaviorist epistemology of other minds. Theoretical Medicine 12(1), 69–79 (1991)
Lakoff, G., Johnson, M.: Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (1980)
Leone, S. (Director): A Fistful of Dollars, Motion Picture (1964)
Lombardi, C.: Sizing up the coming robotics revolution (May 15, 2007), http://news.cnet.com/Sizing-up-the-coming-robotics-revolution/2008-11394_3-6183596.html (retrieved January 21, 2010)
MacIntyre, A.: Individual and social morality in Japan and the United States: Rival conceptions of the self. Philosophy East and West 40(4), 489–497 (1990)
Magnani, L.: Abduction, Reason, and Science: Processes of Discovery and Explanation. Kluwer, New York (2001)
Maher, B.: Poll results: Look who’s doping. Nature 452, 674–675 (2008)
Pliszka, S.R., McCracken, J.T., Maas, J.W.: Catecholamines in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: Current perspectives. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 35(3), 264–272 (1996)
Putnam, H.: Psychological predicates. In: Capitan, W.H., Merrill, D.D. (eds.) Art, Mind, and Religion, pp. 37–48. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh (1967)
Rumelhart, D.E., McClelland, J.L.: Parallel Distributed Processing, vol. 1. MIT Press, Cambridge (1986)
Sahakian, B., Morein-Zamir, S.: Professor’s little helper. Nature 450, 1157–1159 (2007)
Searle, J.: Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3(3), 417–457 (1980)
Solomon, P., Leiderman, P.H., Mendelson, J., Wexler, D.: Sensory deprivation: A review. American Journal of Psychiatry 114(4), 357–363 (1957)
Ter Hark, M.R.: The development of Wittgenstein’s views about the other-minds problem. Synthese 87(2), 227–253 (1991)
Thagard, P.: Brains and the Meaning of Life. Princeton University Press, Princeton (2010)
Thagard, P.: Computational Philosophy of Science. MIT Press, Cambridge (1993)
Turing, A.: Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59(236), 433–460 (1950)
Watson, J.D.: The Double Helix. Atheneum, New York (1968)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shelley, C. (2010). Does Everyone Think, or Is It Just Me?. In: Magnani, L., Carnielli, W., Pizzi, C. (eds) Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 314. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15223-8_27
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15223-8_27
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15222-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15223-8
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)