Is artificial intelligence possible? Essay -- Computer Science

Is artificial intelligence possible? IS A.I. POSSIBLE? In the science fiction film, The Terminator directed by James Cameron, the computers in the movie "get smart" and rise up against their human masters. In other words, the computers in the movie were able to become independent of their programmers and developed a kind of artificial intelligence (A.I.). This essay will prove that in real life, computers will never realize artificial intelligence, and also even though functionalism is based on an analogy between humans and computers, it is an effective way to describe the interaction between the mind and body. Two essays will be evaluated in this essay. The first essay was called; "Can Computers Think?" by John Searle which rejects the theory of A.I. The second essay was called; "Escaping from the Chinese Room" by Margret Boden, which supports A.I. A functionalist view of the mind is one that draws an analogy between the functioning of the human brain and the functioning of the digital computer. The strongest view says that the mind and the brain are just digital computers. This is called strong A.I., which is a term coined by John Searle. American Hilary Putnam was one of the first to make the analogy between the brain and the computer Putnam said it made no more sense to compare the mind and the brain then to compare the software with the hardware of a computer. He also made the point that psychologists were like programmers and electrical engineers were like physicians. Putnam also made the point not to take the analogy too far. There are important differences between computers and humans. One of the differences Putnam felt was that "à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦all humans were able to learn from their experience and so change their own program but few computers could do that unaided" Hilary Putnam also argued against identifying psychological events with neurophysiologic events, and even against the attempt to do so. He felt mapping the brain to the mind was a waste of time. Jerry Fodor was another well known functionalist. Fodor, like Putnam felt that functionalism alleviated many of the problems associated with other mind body theories. These other mind body theories included Cartesian Dualism, materialism, behaviorism and the identity theory. Cartesian Dualism is the theory that that the mind and the brain are two separate things... ... as these are products of people not brains." She tries to demonstrate that the robot and the human brain are the same, in that they are both made up of small very stupid parts which build into a collective brain that is capable of understanding; "The fact that a certain light sensitive cell can respond to intensity gradients and that one neuron can inhibit the firing of another" Problem with this explanation is that now instead of input from a keyboard, the robot now receives its information from its sensors. The input will still be processed programming in the CPU of the robot. Boden did not disprove Searle's point that the syntax of a program is not sufficient for understanding of a digital computer system. Boden could not show that non-biological entity did have understanding, but she did show that Searle's argument on this point was a little weak because it relied on in tuition. The functionalism theory was shown to be an attractive theory a long as it was not taken too literally. Consequently it was shown in this essay that due to syntactical nature of computer programs and the computers lack of causal powers needed for a machine to have mental states.