Robot=Minds?

Robot=Minds?

Sterling Bradford 2/8/09 Robots and Minds In this essay the Author Mr. Lycan brings up the question of computer intelligence and its relation to human intelligence/the human brain. His first argument deals with the belief that machines can poses consciousness. He believes that if you took a fully conscious human being and slowly replaced all their human parts with synthetic ones (including the brain) the individual would become in his words an “artifact” that proves machine consciousness. I completely disagree with this statement as the author is simply making while conjecture. He states at the start of his article that, “virtually nothing is known about how we organize or manage the vast, seething profusion of information that comes our way” meaning that we know nothing of how the human mind works or what makes us special. We have no way of reproducing the human brain as he states so how would we begin to replace the “artifacts” in question. The author is only dreaming into his idealized future, which is fine in its own right but it proves nothing by way of logic as we are not in a position to say if that is possible in the future or not. The next argument deals with a “fabulously sophisticated machine” called Harry. Again like before hairy is a fantasy an simply an idealized version of a computer program that the author has created. He argues first that harry could be unpredictable which is grossly untrue. If harry was a program albeit a very complicated one it couldn’t simply decided to do something random. If a random event was to occur it would only seem that way to us as we can’t see the program when in reality it would be completely explainable. Lastly the author presents an argument against harries consciousness, saying that his programs would have no feeling behind them. I believe this is missing the whole idea of a program. There is no mystery in a program, no undiscovered electrical pulse that makes a machine work. It is simply command lines being...

Similar Essays