Dualism and Artificial Intelligence

The most prominent example of the concept of a machine being intelligent in the manner of this so

Despite this earlier work, there was still no explanation of how the soul and body worked together, if at all. This was until Descartes (1596- 1650) who provided the fundamental writings on dualism with his work Meditiations on First Philosophy. Indeed, he is considered "the father of modern philosophy" and his Meditations lead to the school of dualistic ontology known as Cartesian Interactionist Dualism, which still inspires much thought and extension by modern philosophers today. Descartes defined the 'mind' as "all the feelings and sensations that he could describe, but which he could not locate physically". He then furthered this by saying that the mind is everything that is non-physical.

Firstly, we must consider that the machine we are considering would be either a computer or a robot (Study Guide, p. 104). And for such a machine to be a thinking thing, it may be described as having a mind, intelligence or having to the ability to reason (Study Guide p.104). Descartes' dualism, which supposes the humans are made up of the body and the mind (physical and non-physical), makes him sceptical of machines being able to think. One of Descartes' arguments is based on the assumtpion that the ability of a machine to use language cannot possibly been processed in similar way to humans (study guide, p. 105). Turing would describe this the argument from "various disabilities" (Study Guide, p.135). His other argument is based on the idea that machines will ultimately fail to perform certain acts, since they must be programmed for each act and there is a limitation of the amount of 'organs' that a machine can have (study guide, p.135). This would be described by Turing as the argument from "informality of behaviour"(study guide, p.139) or the argument from consciousness (study guide, p. 135).

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

In an effort to prove that computers will never evolve into systems similar to human, Fish (2011) also presents an illogical argument that men will never be able to create a machine that is comparable to mankind, which is a paradox in itself as he tries to prove mankind’s superiority by assuming a limited the scope of man’s intelligence in creating complex machines with cognitive abilities.

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 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 His life did not contain that many spectacular events, rather slow, grand, specific achievements that often seemed purely academic at the time. Many of these were not even publically known until after his death, due

When the human emerges, their perceptions enable the brain to function automatically, by coding their obtained information. Hence, after birth infants instantaneously enter the endless cycle of learning. Despite being born a human, what truly makes us superior is our ability to learn, and function within society, after viewing Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, the film confirms that artificial intelligence (AI), can obtain knowledge, learn from it, and act like humans. On a side note, Alex Turing, developer of the Turing Test: a test that analyzes people who are virtually detecting if they are talking to machines or humans; he once wrote: “If a machine behaves as intelligently as a human being, then it is as intelligent as a human being” (Crevier

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

Alan Turing’s simple explanation of the imitation game is as follows: the game consists of three participants. Participant A is a man, participant B is a woman, and participant C is the interrogator (can be a man or woman). In the Imitation Game, participant C is placed in a different room from participant A and B (they are represented as X and Y). The interrigator can communicate with them via written notes. By asking questions of participant A and participant B, the interrigator tries to determine which of the two is the man and which is the woman. Participant A's role is to trick the interrogator into making the wrong decision, while participant B attempts to assist the interrogator in making the right

He does not deny that machines can think, however he distinguishes the difference between humans being machines and machines who are information-processing computers. Searle states that they are both different and that computer’s cannot think. His Chinese Room argument, argues that while meeting the criteria of: using a comprehensive manual, and given that Searle follows this manual correctly, Searle in the room does not know a single word of Chinese, the Chinese room theory can pass the Turing Test without semantics. This attempts to solve the debate over whether or not machines can think, trying to prove the Turing Test wrong. As long as a machine or a person follows the manual of this logical language to answer questions given to them, in a test they have the potential to pass a thinking test such as the Turing Test. The Chinese Room argument tackles the debate of thinking machines, and tries to prove that programmed machines may seem to understand language, however it does not in fact understand the language (Searle 1980). Therefore, proving the Turing Test to be insufficient of proof of thinking

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 put this argument forward in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. His opening pages of the paper begin with the words; "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?” (Alan Turing 1950). My main argument to this is that a computer does not have the ability to think, primarily because it was created rather than ‘born and raised’.

Building off his established idea of the Cogito, Descartes continues to formulate an idea of how the world operates. He arrives upon one of the most widely held metaphysical opinions, especially among a majority of the world’s religions, which is mind-body dualism. Mind-body dualism states that there are two types of entities in the world; those which have extension and measurable qualities such as the body and existing separately is the non physical mind.

Another issue Cartesian dualism faces in the mind-body problem. This is how the soul and the body are integrated, and considers how they affect one another. Descartes’ solution is that the body and the mind is separate. Idealists’ solution is that there is only mind, explaining the body as only being an extension of the mind. However as technology has advanced and neuroscience developed, processes such as emotions, memory and perceptions have all been shown to have a neurological basis, refuting the dualism theory of consciousness. PET, MRI, EEG and MEG are all ways of measuring electric and magnetic neural activity, gradually allowing the pathways and areas of the brain to be understood (Taylor 2013.) The mind is no longer such a mystery. A physical reductive approach could be taken to this mind-body problem, where our consciousness is purely generated from matter, and there is no “mind” in the way

Many people have objections to Turing’s test, objections that he counters in the latter part of his paper. In this particular objection Professor Jefferson brings up the idea that a machine cannot be deemed intelligent because it is unable to feel. A machine cannot compose art from thoughts or feelings, nor can a machine feel pleasure, guilt, or grief. Jefferson claims that until a machine is able to do these things, it cannot be considered as intelligent as the human brain. He claims that Turing’s test does not