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Edsger Dijkstra: "The question of whether Machines Can Think (…) is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."
by lambdatronics 4y ago
Edsger Dijkstra: "The question of whether Machines Can Think (…) is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."
- mannykannot 4y agoThat's an amusing aphorism from a giant in the field, and it was a reasonable thing to say about the technology of that time, but it avoids, rather than answers, the much bigger question of whether machines could ever think.
- kirkules 4y agoOn the contrary, it highlights that the question is generally not well posed and trying to answer it before figuring out how to ask it is silly.
- mannykannot 4y agoPeople have been asking grand but poorly-posed questions for millennia, and sometimes this leads to well-posed questions that elicit remarkable answers. What is poorly-posed about the question 'could a machine think'? 'Machine' seems acceptably well-defined, and not in a way that rules out, a priori, the possibility of any machine being able to think, so I'm guessing the problem lies in us not having a good definition of thinking - but if that is what makes the question poorly-posed, then surely it also makes the question 'what is thinking?' poorly-posed, yet people stubbornly persist in attempting to address it.
- kirkules 4y agoYes, the issue is that word, "think", and its variants. But "what is thinking?" isn't poorly posed in the case that "thinking" isn't well defined, because it is about establishing and agreeing on a definition. The approach some people take to answering "could machines think?" is to try to determine an actual subject in the real world to call "thinking" in a way that aligns with common intuitions, which to me seems like a good approach. But many (most?) approaches I've encountered instead just assume personal intuition about thinking is sufficient, and worse, in common with all other askers of the question.
- mannykannot 4y agoI certainly agree that there's a lot of low-quality debate around this and similarly open-ended questions. I think your objection can be made even within the philosophy of the mind (though you may not agree with me!) This is a significant branch of philosophy, and within it, hundreds if not thousands of papers have been written in attempting to prove that nothing operating by the laws of physics as we know them today, nor any future extension of them, could have a mind - yet those who have been trying to do this are no better off than anyone else in knowing what a mind is. Coming back to Dijkstra's aphorism, you will notice that I was objecting to interpreting it as ruling out, a priori, the question of whether machines could ever think. From your latest post, however, you seem to be saying it would be a reasonable question once we are equipped with an established and agreed-upon definition of thinking.
- lambdatronics 4y agoHumans can think; humans are machines; therefore machines can think.
- mannykannot 4y agoThat works for me, but I feel it is like Dijkstra's aphorism in the sense that neither seems likely to change the minds of many people who are not already aligned with it. Then there are those, like Searle and Penrose, who agree but insist that thinking is beyond the abilities of any merely Turing-equivalent device.