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Digital Philosophy

Rescuing Mind from the Machines

Vincent J. Carchidi agrees with Descartes and friends that our ability to use language creatively distinguishes our minds from computers.

The study of artificial intelligence was originally conceived partly as an effort to make sense of the human mind. That is to say, the pursuit of practical computing machines ran parallel to an interest in computing as a model of human cognition. This was present from the start in Alan Turing’s 1950 essay ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. Indeed, some scholars argue that the field of AI moved from a multidisciplinary effort to simulate the workings of the human mind, to a project of literally building human-like intelligence into machines.

The shift can be exaggerated; after all, figures such as John von Neumann spoke even in the twentieth century of an approaching technological ‘singularity’.

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