According to the biological objection against strong artificial intelligence (AI), machines cannot have human mindedness – that is, they cannot be conscious, intelligent, sentient, etc. in the precise way that a human being typically is – because this requires being alive, and machines are not alive. Proponents of the objection include John Lucas, Hubert Dreyfus, and John Searle. The present paper explains the nature and significance of the biological objection, before arguing that it currently represents an essentially irrational position.

Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion has traditionally been grounded in non-cognitivism about religious belief. This paper shows that the Wittgensteinian tradition has wrongly neglected a significant movement towards cognitivism in Wittgenstein’s later writings. The argument proceeds on the basis of two main claims. First, Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy, as expressed in his _Philosophical Investigations_, clearly favours cognitivism over non-cognitivism with regard to certain linguistic facts about ordinary religious discourse. Second, during the last decade of his life Wittgenstein’s view of religious belief actually (...) underwent a significant shift in the direction of cognitivism, which finds its most striking expression in the analogy he draws to the ‘honest religious thinker’. (shrink)