Thursday, January 26, 2012

Could a machine think? In light of the Intentional Stance, on the one hand, and the Chinese Room on the other.

This is a very tricky and philosophical question, and it is at the root of what we consider Artificial Intelligence. Personally, I believe a robot could eventually be trained to have independent thought, and I will explain this position with regard to the two arguments you set forward.
The intentional stance is a premise of rationale and thought, developed by Daniel Dennett, that regards every action as intentional and predictable. In this way, Dennett argues the opposite of what is usually the rationale with intelligent thought, stating instead that human thought is already predictable and therefore machine-like.
The Chinese room thought experiment postulates that if a reasoning program were in an isolated room and were fed Chinese words, it could use a logical process to produce corresponding Chinese words and therefore pass the Turing test. There is, in my opinion, a fundamental flaw in this argument: its decision that, by following a logical program, the system is doing no thinking. In reality, the logical program is an example of higher-order thinking and decision-making. Therefore, it is a thought-processing system.
In many ways, intelligent human thought is much like a machine’s logical processing. We use inputs from our environment and a predetermined set of logical criteria (prior knowledge, ethics, and experiences) to make decisions and perform actions. Because of this, it seems only a matter of time before machines are capable of independent thought.

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