display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
| 3979 | The Turing Machine is the best idea yet about how the mind works [Fodor on Turing] |
| Full Idea: Alan Turing had (in his theory of the 'Turing Machine') what I suppose is the best thought about how the mind works that anyone has had so far. | |
| From: comment on Alan Turing (Computing Machinery and Intelligence [1950]) by Jerry A. Fodor - Jerry A. Fodor on himself p.296 | |
| A reaction: I am not convinced, because I don't think rationality is possible without consciousness. The brain may bypass the representations used by a computer. |
| 5321 | In 50 years computers will successfully imitate humans with a 70% success rate [Turing] |
| Full Idea: In about fifty years' time it will be possible to program computers to play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70% chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. | |
| From: Alan Turing (Computing Machinery and Intelligence [1950], p.57), quoted by Robert Kirk - Mind and Body §5.9 | |
| A reaction: This is the famous prophecy called 'The Turing Test'. The current state (2004) seems to be that the figure of 70% is very near, but no one sees much prospect of advancing much further in the next 100 years. Dennett sees jokes as a big problem. |
| 6146 | Before Creation it is assumed that God still had many many mental properties [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The belief of theists that God might never have created implies that there is a possible world that contains just a single entity with many conscious mental properties. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §4.II) | |
| A reaction: So if we believe content is wide, we must believe that God was incapable of thought before creation, and thus couldn't plan creation, and so didn't create, and so the Creator is a logical impossibility. Cool. |
| 6147 | The hypothesis of solipsism doesn't seem to be made incoherent by the nature of mental properties [Merricks] |
| Full Idea: The hypothesis of solipsism, that I - an entity with many conscious mental properties - am all that exists, while surely false, is not rendered incoherent simply by the nature of the mental properties. | |
| From: Trenton Merricks (Objects and Persons [2003], §4.II) | |
| A reaction: This, along with the thought of a pre-Creation God, is a nice intuitive case for showing that we strongly believe in some degree of narrow content. |