Disposable darlings
A few notes about gynoids, A.I., and consciousness.
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Your skin is like vinyl
The perfect companion
— Roxy Music (For Your Pleasure, 1973)
The Blue Book (Wittgenstein, 1958)
[A] queer kind of medium, the mind; and the mechanism of the mind, the nature of which, it seems, we don’t quite understand, can bring about effects which no material mechanism could. Thus e.g. a thought (which is such a mental process) can agree or disagree with reality; I am able to think of a man who isn’t present; I am able to imagine him, ‘mean him’ in a remark which I make about him, even if he is thousands of miles away or dead. “What a queer mechanism,” one might say, “the mechanism of wishing must be if I can wish that which will never happen.
The Blue Book (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 16)
There is an objection to saying that thinking is some such thing as an activity of the hand. Thinking, one wants to say, is part of our ‘private experience’. It is not material, but an event in our private consciousness. This objection is expressed in the question: “Can machines think?” […] “Can a machine have toothache?” You will certainly be inclined to say: “A machine can’t have toothache?”. All I will do now is to draw your attention to the use which you have made of the word “can” and to ask you: “Did you mean to say that all our past experience has shown that a machine never had toothache?” The impossibility of which you speak is a logical one. The question is: What is the relation between thinking (or toothache) and the subject which thinks, has toothache, etc.?”
Mind 49 (A. M. Turing, 1950)
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 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…
