Thinking Machines

2 Pages 588 Words

Machines and Thinking

Can a machine think? I think not. We are able to think because we are alive, aware and conscious. A machine is unable to think for the simple fact that it is constructed by man, and operates according to a design purposefully built or programmed into it. The question of whether a machine can think or not has been on the minds of many, due to the on going updates in technology ever year. Maybe some day machines will be able to think like we do. But for now, thinking is what identifies us as humans and not as machines.
Normally when people talk about a machine thinking, they are referring to a computer: a digital device capable of manipulating symbols according to a stored program. Now lets analyze what we know about computers and what we know about thinking. Thinking refers to an activity of consciousness. It means the purposeful use of logic and concepts to achieve awareness of some conclusion. Without consciousness, we can have calculation, but not thinking. Therefore computers have calculation and lack of consciousness.
Consciousness is an aspect of existence. There isn’t anything else. But it has a unique relationship to existence. It’s not something that we can perceive directly; each of us is directly aware, by introspection, of one consciousness, and we deduce the existence of other minds from the similarity of their actions to our own.
Two views of the mind have been common in philosophy; these may be called the spiritual and materialist views. The spiritual view holds that consciousness is a separate substance which coexists with the body. In most versions of this view, it controls the body’s operations and gains sensory information from it, but it isn’t really part of it. Consciousness possesses free will and is exempt from the mechanistic causality of matter. The spiritual view is often associated with religion, but can be held independently of arguments for a God.
The materialist or...