This is what David Chalmers at New York University, one of the most influential philosophers studying the mind, calls “the hard problem.” You could lay out everything there is to say about how the brain produces the sensation of tasting a pretzel-and it would still say nothing about what tasting that pretzel was actually like. Here we can group everything from sensations like pleasure and pain, to emotions like fear and anger and joy, to the peculiar private experiences of hearing a dog bark or tasting a salty pretzel or seeing a blue door.įor some, it’s not possible to reduce these experiences to a purely scientific explanation. First-person, subjective experience-the feeling of being in the world-is known as “phenomenal” consciousness. As in the case of what philosophers call “zombies”-and as I used to like to pretend I observed in people-it is logically possible that a being can act intelligent when there is nothing going on “inside.”īut there’s another side to consciousness that remains mysterious. It is routine to talk about intelligent machines, even though most would agree that those machines are mindless. Yet fast-forward 70 years and we live with Turing’s legacy, not Jefferson’s. Jefferson ruled out the possibility of a thinking machine because a machine lacked consciousness, in the sense of subjective experience and self-awareness (“pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse”). In 1948, two years before Turing described his “Imitation Game,” Geoffrey Jefferson, a pioneering brain surgeon, gave an influential speech to the Royal College of Surgeons of England about the Manchester Mark 1, a room-sized computer that the newspapers were hailing as an “electronic brain.” Jefferson set a far higher bar than Turing: “Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain-that is, not only write it but know that it had written it.” ![]() But not everyone was prepared to disregard the invisible parts of thinking, the irreducible experience of the thing having the thoughts-or what we would call consciousness.
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