Welcome to Wales: Searle on the Computational Theory of Mind

Summary

In a recent book devoted to giving an overview of cognitive science, Justin Lieber writes:

… dazzingly complex computational processes achieve our visual and linguistic understanding, but apart from a few levels of representation these are as little open to our conscious view as the multitudinous rhythm of blood flow through the countless vessels of our brain.

It is the aim of hundreds of workers in the allied fields of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence to unmask these computation processes and install them in digital computers.

Professor Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading says that within fifteen years there will be machines appreciably more intelligent than any human being and, echoing John McCarthy, he foresees: ‘a machine-based intelligent environment, and we're just what we would regard as animals within that’.

The image of the computer or robot endowed with genuine mentality resonates deeply in the collective psyche of late twentieth-century Western culture, and that image often has the dark overtones hinted at by Professor Warwick and made explicit in films such as Westworld. And no wonder. The computer is the most complex technology ever devised by man, and we hold it up as a mirror to our own souls.