Diana Bang's ETEC 531 e-portfolio

One of the key concepts considers the possibility of creating consciousness in machines. Related to this is the question of whether the brain contains consciousness or thoughts. For example, Alan Turing (1950) suggested that if a computer could trick a person into thinking they were communicating with another person (via an interface) then it could be deemed as intelligent. Yet, John Searle (1980) argued that this was not a sufficient test and rejected the idea that computers would ever become completely intelligent. Also, another aspect to consider is information theory in that the carrier of the information does not matter nearly as much as the patterns of information that are carried. According to Murphie & Potts (2003) this is a critical idea since it suggests that two different material objects (i.e. a brain and computer) can carry the same patterns and processes in their materially different ways. However, in order to design machine intelligence we must understand how the brain functions. For example, there is much debate about whether the brain operates as in a hierarchical manner where information is processed in a system (i.e. this translates to a top-down approach in artificial intelligence). Several issues arise with this theory since it assumes that human thought is a “coherent, ordered, complex and more or less unchanging program” (Murphie & Potts, 2003, p.153). In order to effectively mimic the brain, one must develop a complex system before it can do any thinking and as such attempts to build “thought factories” have been unsuccessful as of yet (Murphie & Potts, 2003).