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Posts Tagged ‘machine’

The Turing machine as an image of thought

Posted in juvenilia, theory, tagged , , , , , on 22/06/2013| Leave a Comment »

A long time ago, when I was an undergraduate, I studied a module about Artificial Intelligence and philosophy of mind. It covered Searle’s Chinese Room argument, the Turing test, traditional AI vs connectionism. That sort of thing.

I think the main consequence of this was a realisation that I preferred intellectual history to that kind of philosophy. The impression I got was that debates trying to sort out the relation between “the body” and “the mind” didn’t appear either to have achieved their aim or to have said much of interest along the way. Better to relate a course of events and a line of thought. But that’s by the by.

One of the ideas mentioned in this course was that “the mind” was a Turing machine. I thought I had a pretty good argument for saying it wasn’t, but I never had the opportunity to state it. Now, let me see: how did it go again?
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Looking up / looking down

Posted in theory, tagged , , , , , , on 10/01/2010| Leave a Comment »

Related to this, from Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps by Peter Galison:

Over the last thirty years it has become a commonplace to pit bottom-up against top-down explanations. Neither will do in accounting for time. A medieval saying aimed at capturing the links between alchemy and astronomy put it this way: in looking down, we see up; in looking up, we see down. That vision of knowledge serves us well. For in looking down (to the electromagnetically regulated clock networks) we see up: to images of empire, metaphysics, and civil society. In looking up (to the philosophy of Einstein and Poincaré’s procedural concepts of time, space, and simultaneity) we see down: to the wires, gears, and pulses passing through the Bern patent office and the Paris Bureau of Longitude. We find metaphysics in machines, and machines in metaphysics. Modernity, just in time.

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