Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your two complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on AI

by Matt Qvortrup

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception.

Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

“I think, therefore AI”, René Descartes (1596-1650) did not say. Of course, the great French philosopher and mathematician couldn’t have foreseen the advent of artificial intelligence, yet it does not follow that his philosophy is devoid of perspectives that fit the current debate. Probably he would have sided with those who think that computers cannot be sentient beings, for he wrote that machines, even if they “possessed greater Reason than any of us, and could surpass us in all things”, would nevertheless prove to be…

“…destitute of Reason, and that it is Nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs: thus it is seen, that a clock composed only of wheels and weights can number the hours and measure time more exactly than we with all our skill.” (Discourse on Method).

Three hundred years on, John Searle wrote in a 1980 paper that “according to strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states.” (‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences). He then critiqued this claim with his famous Chinese Room thought experiment. It goes roughly like this. A man who speaks only English is locked in a room with a big book of instructions in English and “a large batch of Chinese writing.” Somebody outside the room gives him cards with Chinese characters on, perhaps through a slot in the door. He looks up these characters in the big book and following instructions he finds there, selects other cards, also with Chinese characters, and pushes them out through the slot. A Chinese-speaker outside the room interprets what is going on as her having a conversation with the room – and yet the man inside the room understands nothing of what is being said. By analogy, this suggests that AI chatbots capable of conversations need not have any understanding or consciousness.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was famously a materialist. He was also rather ahead of his time when he suggested that the mind was, in effect, a kind of computer: “We must not therefore thinke that Computation… has place onely in numbers; as if man were distinguished from other living Creatures (which is said to have been the opinion of Pythagoras) by nothing but the faculty of numbring.” For, “such things as we adde or substract, that is, which we put into an account, we are said to consider, signifies to Compute, Reason or Reckon,” he wrote (Elements of Philosophy, p.4). Basically, if you can perform these functions, you can reason. Perhaps, had he lived today, he might have put it differently: “I compute, therefore I am.”

Matt Qvortrup’s book Great Minds on Small Things is now available in Spanish as Grandes Mentes Y Pequeñas Cosas.