Can a machine think?
Computation, understanding, the body and artificial intelligence
Can a machine think? Philosophers give 4 main answers: thinking is computing, understanding is missing, it takes a living body and an ill-posed question. AskPhilosophy presents 11 arguments, from Thomas Hobbes to Noam Chomsky, reconstructed step by step, logic-checked and verified word for word against their original texts.
The 4 possible answers
Each column is one way of answering the question: what it holds and the philosophers who defend it. Click a column to see only its arguments.
Thinking is manipulating symbols by rules: a well-built machine can do it too.
Leibniz, Hobbes, Alan Turing
A machine can imitate thought, but it does not understand what it does.
René Descartes, John Searle, Ada Lovelace, John Randolph Lucas
Thinking requires a body, a life, a world one is engaged in: not just rules.
Wittgenstein, Hubert Dreyfus
The word 'think' is too vague: the real question lies elsewhere.
Edsger W. Dijkstra, Noam Chomsky
The arguments
Click an argument to see it step by step, with the objections and replies.
Thinking is computing
Thinking is manipulating symbols by rules: a well-built machine can do it too.
3 argumentsLet us calculate: a writing of thoughts to settle disputes
If thoughts are written as signs, reasoning becomes calculating, and a faulty argument is just a miscalculation.
Reasoning is nothing but reckoning
Reasoning is adding and subtracting signs chosen by convention; an operation that is only that can be done by a device.
The imitation game: replacing the question with a test
Of other humans we know only their answers; if a machine answers the same way, we have no reason to deny it thought.
Understanding is missing
A machine can imitate thought, but it does not understand what it does.
4 argumentsA machine might utter words, but without knowing what it says
A machine can utter words, but reason works in every situation while organs need a specific arrangement for each case.
The Chinese room
A program manipulates symbols by their shape alone, which is not enough to understand what they mean.
The machine originates nothing: it carries out what it is ordered
The machine only does what we know how to order it to do and anticipates nothing, and creating takes more than that.
The Gödelian argument against mechanism
We can see that a formula is true, while any consistent machine cannot produce it.
It takes a living body
Thinking requires a body, a life, a world one is engaged in: not just rules.
2 argumentsWe say "it thinks" only of a living being, or of what resembles one
We say "it thinks" only of a living being or of what resembles one; a machine falls outside how the word is used.
A body, a world, a situation: what rules do not say
Human intelligence rests on bodily know-how and common sense that cannot be reduced to explicit rules.
An ill-posed question
The word 'think' is too vague: the real question lies elsewhere.
2 argumentsCan machines think? As relevant as whether submarines can swim
Once we know how a machine works, whether it 'thinks' changes no fact: it is merely a question of vocabulary.
Does a submarine swim? A question of decision about a word, not of fact
Asking if a machine thinks is like asking if a submarine swims: we choose how to extend a word, there is no fact to find.
Other philosophers' positions arrive as profiles are completed. No position is presented as the winner.