Cognitive Inquiry and the Philosophy of Mind

Abstract

Artificial intelligence deals with the most concrete and modern of artifacts, digital computers, and at the same time raises abstract and philosophical questions. Can a computer be genuinely intelligent? An answer to this question presupposes that we have an answer to a more general question: What is intelligence? Can a computer simulate intelligence? We then need to know what the difference is between merely simulating intelligence and being intelligent. Can a computer understand a language? What is a language? Can a computer have a mind? Can a sequential digital computer do what a massively parallel neuronal system can? Can a computer have beliefs, desires, intentions? Can a computer make mistakes? Have emotions? Experience sensations? Be creative? Are computers more like programmed texts or like the authors of such texts?

Artificial Intelligence cannot avoid philosophy. If a computer program is to behave intelligently in the real world, it must be provided with some kind of framework into which to fit particular facts it is told or discovers. This amounts to at least a fragment of some kind of philosophy, however naive. Here I agree with philosophers who advocate the study of philosophy and claim that one who purports to ignore it is merely condemning himself to a naive philosophy. —John McCarthy (1988)¹