Essay On Mind And Artificial Intelligence

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Both the mind and machines are complex physical substances which we may or may not ever fully understand. Nonetheless, there are large portions of the brain and machines that we are aware of, but different people have different theories explaining how they work. Over the course of this semester my views about the mind and artificial intelligence have changed. In this paper I will first go through how my views about the human mind have changed going over the brain theory of personal identity, the modularity of the mind and mentalese. I will next explain how my views about artificial intelligence have changed over this semester, focusing on the brain theory, modularity, mentalese, the Turing test and arguments against artificial intelligence. At the beginning of this course I believed that who you are as a person, your ‘self’, is in the brain. I partially …show more content…
Before I believed that because the choices we make are molded by our subconscious, and because we are not aware of our subconscious mind, we do not have free will because the choices we believe to be in full control of, we are not. I also separated our subconscious mind from our conscious mind and believed that what makes you yourself is only the parts of your body and mind that you are aware of. A large part of what makes me able to agree with Caroline’s view is her definition of being free, which Williams writes on page 31 and states that “To say that we are free is to say that there are no persons or external circumstances preventing us from doing what we want to do.” Because we have the ability to make decisions freely without an external force stopping us, and because we make choices and decisions based on things that have previously occurred, the theory that free will and determinism are compatible must be

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