by N. Kateris
It goes without saying, that computers' skills and abilities are increasing exponentially. Who would expect a hundred years ago that a machine would be able to calculate solutions to differential equations, analyse the air flow around a moving vehicle and propose improvements to make the vehicle more aerodynamic, even respond to written answers similarly to a human? Many argue that computers already are or will be more powerful than human brains. Nevertheless, should we say that computers have minds?
According to Wikipedia, a mind is the complex of cognitive faculties that enable consciousness, thinking, reasoning, perception and judgment—a characteristic of human beings, but which also may apply to other life forms.
Most would agree that no computer displays these characteristics. And many people support the opinion that computers will never be able to think like us or be able to reason, judge, etc. Their main argument is that just like the Chinese room thought experiment, even if computers seem to understand what they are told and provide logical answers, they do not really have knowledge, they just follow an algorithm which enables them to give a solution to a problem, without the computer really understanding what the problem is about or why it must be solved. In addition, the computer is not able to discover a new way to solve the problem and sticks to the method, which programmers have taught it to follow.
Moreover, although systems such as cleverbot are successful at communicating with humans and sometimes go unnoticed, they are not believed to actually be communicating like we do. Therefore, even if cleverbot, or a similar machine, pass the Turing Test, they will do it by just retrieving files with answers to certain questions, not by a thought process. All computers understand is the syntactic properties of language, not the semantic properties. Never could anyone say that computers know the meaning of the answers they provide, the just know when to give a certain answer.
However, how do human brains work? A human brain (and animals' brains as well) consist of a large number of neurons that communicate by sending electrical signals to each other. This resembles the structure of a CPU, which consists of transistors that send electrical signals. Therefore, theoretically speaking, provided that the human brain is analysed and understood fully by scientists, a just as complicated computer might be made, with the same synapses as a human brain.
As a result, in my opinion, computers do not have minds yet. If a very complicated computer that imitates the human brain is constructed, it may have the same cognitive skills and abilities as us, since it will function in the same way as a human brain. Then, it may have consciousness, thinking, reasoning, perception and judgment. Nevertheless, I do not believe that this will not happen very soon and by then we will probably not be using computers in the form we know them today. Who knows, maybe humans will be growing artificial brains in labs and using them as computers!
