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Artificial Intelligence
contributions to AICS (Ptacek, 1994). They tell us nothing about human cognition, except that an electrical machine working on different principles can defeat human beings in playing chess, as it can defeat human beings in doing arithmetic.
For the sake of the discussion, let us assume that AIPA is completely successful and that we will soon have programs whose performance can equal or beat that of any human in any comprehension task at all. Assume we had machines that could not only play better chess but display equal or better comprehension of natural languages, write equal or better novels and poems, and prove equal or better mathematical theorems. In short, let us fantasize any success of AIPA that we care to imagine. What should we make of these results? What would be the implications for AICS of such successes in AIPA?
Well, even within the cognitive science approach, there are some further distinctions to be made. The strongest claim of all is that if we programmed a digital computer with the right programs and if it had the right inputs and outputs, then it would have thoughts and feelings in exactly the same literal sense in which you and I have thoughts and feelings. According to this view, the computer implementing an AICS program is not just simulating intelligent thought processes; it actually has these thought processes. Again, on this view, the computer is not a metaphor for the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer literally has a mind; so if we had an AIPA program that appropriately matched human cognition, we would artificially have created an actual mind.
From what I have learned thus far about AI, it is to say that the mind is to the brain as the program is to the hardware. The mind, in short, is just the program in the hardware or wetware of the human brain, but these very same minds could be equally programmed in commercial digital computers manufactured by Compaq or IBM. One should always distinguish Strong AI from other forms of AICS. At the opposite end of the scale is the weakest claim of artificial intelligence: simply, that the appropriately programmed digital computer is a tool that can be used in the study of human cognition. By attempting to simulate the formal structure of cognitive processes on a computer, we can better come to understand cognition. On this weaker view, the computer plays the same role in the study of human beings that it plays in any other discipline (Taubes, 1995; Crawford, 1994).
We use computers to simulate the behavior of weather patterns, airline flight schedules, and the flow of money in things such as the Brazilian economy. But no one engaged in programming any of these computer simulations thinks that the computer program literally makes rainstorms, so that when we turn the machine on we are likely to be drenched; nor do they suppose that the computer will literally take off and fly to San Diego when we are doing a computer simulation of [next page]