PHILOS 1E03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Turing Test, Thought Experiment, John Searle
8 Dec 2014
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Many philosophers of mind have been impressed by analogies between minds/brains and computers. The notion of computation in question is technical: it denotes the formal manipulation of symbols, which are themselves representations. A computer manipulates symbols using aprocesses that are sensitive only to the symbols themselves, not to what they represent (their syntax not their semantics ) According to the computational theory of the mind, thinking just is computation (the formal manipulation of symbols) Computers cannot form mental images, have societal biases etc. British philosopher, mathematician and code-breaker alan turing was a pioneer in theorizing about the nature and limits of computation. In his 1950 article computing machinery and intelligence, turing proposed a famous test for whether a computer has intelligence and hence a mind ( turing test officially called imitation. He also argued that there is no good in principle reason to deny that computers could have minds and think.
