The Computational Universe

Despite our class discussion of Searle’s article, I still think there is a clear conclusion in the article that computers can never think. I don’t really agree with the fact that Searle’s only objective is to show that the the Turing Test is not a good and reliable measure of “thinking”. The example with the Chinese room has a really convincing and deep meaning - it does not only ridicule the test consisting of (in our case) speaking with a computer on a few topics but it also says that “thinking” is not the ability to pick from a list or “a rule book” and combining theoretical principles. Thus, anything that has the ability to think doesn’t consist of rules only - what is then a computer - a program written with fictional symbols - 0s and 1s. If the human brain worked like this, there would be no sciences like psychology, biology, etc. Therefore, “thinking” is not at all an integral part of anything we have been able to construct so far. I don’t really like the way, however, Searle relates the terms “semantics” with the rest of his paper - it is not even necessary to use it in order to achieve the aims of the paper.

Now, I would like to address a few issues we talked about in class. The argument that the Turing test is a fair (no obvious way to cheat ) one is not really convincing. Although there are a lot of different combinations of topics, it is relatively simple to produce relevant databases which comprise of the variety of topics a “normal” person would talk about, and thus simulate a Turing test passing computer. It is in fact even possible to create a program which learns from the people it talks about and imitates ways of writing and stylistic patterns. There is, however, a “slight” difference in the word “thinking” - in my opinion, it should relate more to the class of feelings than to the class of actions.

In conclusion, although the matter is somewhat philosophical, it is, at the current level of science, impossible to program a computer to “think”. This is, however, not at all discouraging as computers can be programmed to do almost any task (including decision making, using algorithms or approximations) any human can do and, further, tasks which will require immense physical or intellectual work (computations and a lot more). Thus, we don’t really need the computers to be able to “think”.

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