I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to (...) the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B. We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?". (shrink)

Philosophers such as Searle have claimed that full articial intelligence is impossible because the symbols used in AI programs are meaningless. This paper proposes that a key to attributing meaning to symbols in programs is satisfaction of a principle of inductive adequacy, which says that an AI program should contain learning mechanisms sufficient to generate all kinds of knowledge structures that it uses in performances. How this principle would work is illustrated using LISP program PI, and an account is developed (...) of how meaning can emerge in a computational system that satisfies the principle. (shrink)

IT is the major stumbling block to the claim that machines could one day possess true intelligence. The question is not whether machines would be able to produce outputs indistinguishable from those of a person, as proponents of “artificial intelligence” have traditionally maintained. Searle has shown, rather, that the real question is whether machines could ever be conscious of objects in the way we know ourselves to be. That would seem to make it, at least in part, a phenomenological problem. (...) By means of microphenomenology, then, I shall try to show that the basic structure of IT, as detected in reflection, can be analyzed in terms of an even more primitive factor, FA. Since attentional processes can be correlated with neurological selectivity, it will be argued that any machine constructed to perform such processes would be capable of IT. I shall, in short, attempt to support the possibility of creating automata capable of intentional activities by trying to describe how they occur in ourselves. (shrink)

IT is the major stumbling block to the claim that machines could one day possess true intelligence. The question is not whether machines would be able to produce outputs indistinguishable from those of a person, as proponents of “artificial intelligence” have traditionally maintained. Searle has shown, rather, that the real question is whether machines could ever be conscious of objects in the way we know ourselves to be. That would seem to make it, at least in part, a phenomenological problem. (...) By means of microphenomenology, then, I shall try to show that the basic structure of IT, as detected in reflection, can be analyzed in terms of an even more primitive factor, FA. Since attentional processes can be correlated with neurological selectivity, it will be argued that any machine constructed to perform such processes would be capable of IT. I shall, in short, attempt to support the possibility of creating automata capable of intentional activities by trying to describe how they occur in ourselves. (shrink)