Tag Archives: Philosophy

Ada Lovelace and the Turing Test

In Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing describes the famous Turing test for detecting machine intelligence. Did you know that Turing’s thesis was heavily influenced by Ada Lovelace’s critique of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, wherein she states that “the Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything,” arguing that computing machines do not exhibit creativity? You [...]

Computationalism and the Extended Mind

In The Extended Mind, Andy Clark and David Chalmers discuss the possibility of extended minds; coupled systems in which a human organism produces cognition, beliefs, and thoughts with the aid of external entities. Clark and Chalmers give the example of Otto, a man suffering from Alzheimer’s who uses a notebook to record his thoughts and [...]