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From: johnsons@stolaf.UUCP (Scott W. Johnson)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re:Re: Can computers think? - (nf)
Message-ID: <1710@stolaf.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 17-May-84 12:11:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: stolaf.1710
Posted: Thu May 17 12:11:45 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 18-May-84 06:55:54 EDT
Organization: St. Olaf College, Northfield MN
Lines: 18

Computers are NOT "effectively Turing machines." Turing proposed his
test to answer the question, Can computers think? In the literature
that I have studied, no psychologist or computer scientist even claims
that there is a machine now that passes Turing's test satisfactorily.
I am not a mind/body dualist. However, the people who claim that
computers can think seem off hand themselves to be dualists. They
separate a mental process, thinking, from the physical organism and
give it to a computer, saying that a computer can indeed think. This
seems to me absurd logic. Thinking cannot be surgically removed from
the biological organism; to do so is to create a monumental blunder,
the very same blunder Descartes made in creating the mind/body dualism
in the first place. And he I repeat myself--we we understand the word
"thinking" we understand it in terms of certain criteria, those criteria
being observable behavior; talking, writing, acting logically. The
computer possesses none of the behavior that we normally ascribe to
the word "thinking." In this sense, computers do not think as we
think. They do not partake of our language, our understanding of what
it means to think.