Can computers think?
Posted: March 26th, 2007 | Author: YuSuF | Filed under: Poping-out Thoughts | Tags: thought | No Comments »
Here is what i think about this;
In
my opinion computers or computing is something really helpful for human
being. Scientists are thinking can computers think or not. If you would
ask me I would definitely say computers can think. But the question is
here “what is thinking”. If you mean thinking by making decisions I
would say yes they can think because they can make decisions. The human
life consists of making decisions. A human stores memories of his/her
life in their brain and makes decision according to these
memories/informations. For example people told me that being a computer
engineer is good thing, then a decided to be a computer engineer.
Regardless of this information comes to me from people (outside of my
brain) or I create it (I create it in my brain), I make my decision
according to that information. My brain defines some good and bad and I
try to choose the good. Same thing absolutely can happen for a
computer. If you program a computer for some good things and some bad
things and tell it to choose always the good then it does just like me
with one difference; I make mistakes but a computer CAN NOT make
mistakes. You would tell me “so what happens if I also program it to
make mistakes?” I would tell you CAN NOT. A mistake is not programmable
since a mistake is not based on any information and it is definitely
not random. Someone who is trying to make a computer a thinking machine
s/he must study on human being more than computers or programming. As I
said making decision is something that computers and human being can do
but a little difference. So from another point of view if we consider
thinking as giving the appropriate reaction to an action the problem
set gets bigger including making decisions. By this idea we don’t only
think on making decisions we also think an giving any kind of reaction
(No matter the reaction is answering a question in any language or
making a movement because of an physical or oral action from outside).
Making decision is selecting a choice among options. But
making/creating/doing a reaction according to an action is about
creating the option set and choosing one of them is done by the thinker
itself. So what about computers making reactions. Since we are
considering making reactions is another view of thinking computer can
also make reactions and thus they can think. How: If a computer is
infected with virus the reactions is cleaning the infected file or
deleting the file or something else. All options are predefined. While
all options are predefined we cannot say that computer is giving
reaction like a human. When the computer creates its options based on
some information then we can say it can think. Actually this is also
possible for a computer. Genetic programming might be a good example
for this in my opinion. I mean a computer which can write its own code
with its working code. Imagine a computer program starts with
predefined code lines and when it starts running it appends lines to
its own code and executes them and this loop goes on forever. In my
opinion appended lines can be non-predefined reactions just like humans
do. So my conclusion is:
QUESTION: CAN COMPUTERS THINK?
ANSWER: COMPUTERS ARE ALREADY THINKING. THEY CAN EVEN LOVE.
But they cannot make mistakes and this is what makes us human!




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