Relation to the world· Mind and consciousness

Only the living think

Axis: Can a machine think — Could a machine ever truly think?

Thought is not an abstract organization but the activity of a living being: feeling, wanting, understanding are born with life and its concern to endure. A machine, however brilliant, remains a fabricated thing: it computes, but nothing matters to it.

Who holds this position

Philosophers 1

Show inferred positions (1)

Kantextrapolated

A modern question, foreign to the corpus: one may nevertheless conjecture that Kant would refuse to ascribe thought to pure mechanism, since thinking requires the spontaneity of apperception, and he opposes the self-organizing organism to the watch, a mere machine. A speculative reading, to be presented as such.

Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Deduction (B131-B132) · Critique of the Power of Judgment, §65

Foundations and implications

↑ What grounds it

A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.

↑ What grounds it

Being or having a body

If thinking is first of all being a living organism coupled to its environment, then manipulating symbols is not enough to understand: a program with neither body nor life does not truly think. The lived-body thesis supports the idea that only the living think: for Jonas, mind is rooted in the organism's life and its concern to endure.

↓ What it implies

A leaf — an application that grounds nothing further here.

Problems

Descriptive Thought experiment
The Chinese Room
Locked in a room, one answers flawlessly in Chinese by following a rulebook, without understanding a word: is running a program ever understanding, or only giving every sign of it?
a mind that understands
Descriptive Thought experiment
The imitation game
If, in a blind conversation, nothing tells the machine from a person, must we grant it thought, or does passing for a mind never prove there is one?
a conversation
Descriptive
Intelligence without a body
A program processes signs outside any world; but grasping a situation, acting with tact, may require a living body that inhabits it, which the disembodied machine lacks.
a disembodied intelligence
Descriptive
Does the substrate matter?
If the exact organization of your brain were reproduced by a whole people passing messages, would that crowd really think, or do only certain materials yield a mind?
the substrate of thought
Descriptive
Thinking, or feeling
Reasoning is one thing, feeling another: a machine might compute everything without there being "something it is like" to be it, thought with no consciousness at all.
a machine's inner feel
PrescriptiveMoral
Would we owe it anything?
If a machine thought, would it have interests, a dignity, rights, or would it remain a thing we dispose of, owing it nothing?
a thinking machine