On the question whether machines can think, Descartes and Turing are in strong disagreement. Evaluate the arguments on either side. Does Searle’s ‘Chinese room’ argument help resolve the debate?

This essay will examine the arguments for and against whether machines can think raised by Descartes, Turing and Searle. I will not consider the practical and current impossibilities in technology and engineering in this question, rather I will focus upon what constitutes thinking and what is needed to attribute thought to a thing.

Descartes’ Position

Descartes states that there are two methods of recognizing that machines. I will label these methods 1 and 2 respectively as follows; that a machine would not be able to ‘produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer’ and that a machine, even if able to do some things, ‘would inevitable fail in others, revealing that it was not acting from understanding but only from the disposition of its organs.’ Descartes explains Method 2 further by separating the ability of humans to use ‘reason in all kind of situations from machines, which may have organs for some particular action’, but practically could not have ‘enough different organs to make it act in the contingencies of life in a way in which our reason acts.’

Descartes’ main arguments in Mediations on First Philosophy can be used to justify his position that machines cannot think . In this essay, following the discussion of Townsend , I will not deal with the validity of these arguments; rather I will focus upon whether they entail the conclusion that machines cannot think. Descartes argues that he, as a thinking thing, is immaterial and thereby rejects materialism. However, Townsend argues that we can accept Descartes’ central arguments without requiring it to follow that the mind is an immaterial substance . Townsend