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Is artificial intelligence possible? Essay

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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 …show more content…

The functionalist theory deflated the importance of the interaction; the mind of the program interacts at one constant level with the brain.
Fodor explained the relationship between the mind and the body as a:
"subtle dualism of absent function (software) and its realization
(hardware)".

Functionalism is also much less rigid a theory when compared to behaviorism. Behaviorism is the theory that all states of mind could be explained by observing a persons behavior, and that a person's mind is just a bunch of psychological dispositions. The problem with behaviorism is demonstrated by Rodin's Le Penseur. The problem was, if there was no behavior then the mental states could not be described.

Materialism is defined by William Lyons as a view that "…everything mental is totally inside the head". Materialism is similar to functionalism although, materialism says nothing about the relationship between the mind and the body.

Searle did not support the idea that idea that the brain could be represented by a digital computer, or that "The implementation of an appropriate computer program is sufficient for thinking". Searle based his argument against strong A.I. by saying that computers can only manipulate symbols, and can not understand them. Therefore, computer instructions are only syntactic and not semantic. The computer program operates like this:

Input (possible from keyboard)à software programà central processing unit (CPU)Ã

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