17.03.2009 00:00:00

Thoughts about Thinking

Daily we are doing all kind of thinking processes without noticing or even knowing about them. The humans brain is such a complex structure that it can handle quite complex operations, making them subconsciously. I've decided to write this paper to make sense of the way computers “thinks” or at least as much it's possible.

In my daily job I'm facing very common problems that I have to solve sometimes thinking for hours on them. The most simple problem is the ordering of the numbers in the right way when they are mixed. Imagine that you have 100,2000,101,354,337,8998,988.... OK. How are you going to put them in order? You'll just take look at them and will say: 100 is the first one, 101 is the second one 337 is the third .... etc.

Well , it quite easy isn't it? But can you tell me how you really did that? For the people this way of thinking is the most common because they simply don't get too rushed to understand how actually these digits are being order by their brains. This is the first and the biggest problem I've faced when first started writing some tiny programs in the very begging of my life with the computers.

This very simple “incident” made me think quite more about how the computers really “thinks” or how do our brain does all the work instead of us. Actually people don't understand the way of all the committed processes are going. According to me they don't completely understand themselves and most of their actions. If they did erh.... then the earth we'd had been a heaven!

Anyway, lets focus on the computers and the way we interact in our daily activities. We are often misunderstanding the meaning of the words we are using and the things we are saying about them. I think this comes from not understanding their way of “thinking”.

For quite a long time we've used to work with programs whose functioning we don't understand completely, at least most of us. Few of us know much about how the ATM works for example. We do know its' external behavior. We know that it needs our card to take out some money from our bank accounts. We don't know much about the way its' keys works or the way it ”knows” how much money we have in the bank but we do know that if there are no money in our bank accounts it won't give us money. As we can see from this example the way of the world is going, it's not necessary for most people to know how every particular thing is working. Our daily lives involve much more sophisticated computer and computer programs that help us doing our job without even suspecting the way they work. We find that ascribing little thoughts to machines is increasingly useful in understanding how to get the good out of them.

The things we need to know concerns the information stored in computers, which is why we find ourselves using psychological words like “knows”,”thinks” and “wants” in referring to machines, even that machines are very different from humans and using them is a pure anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is often an error but it's going to be difficult to understand machines without using mental terms.

For quite a long time philosophically minded people have wrestled with the question of whether it is possible for the machines to think. Daily we interact more and more with computers, so questions like whether machines can think and what kind of thoughts they have becomes much more pertinent.

The answer is based on works in the field of AI (artificial intelligence) which is the science and engineering of making computers solve problems and behave generally to be intelligent. AI research usually involves programming a computer to use specific concepts and have specific mental qualities. Each step of this process is difficult and different programs have different mental qualities. The AI researches are quite complex and quite long to be explained so we'll stop here just saying the main definition

“It will do what it thinks will achieve its goals.”

It had been said quite a lot of the AI in Matrix, the movie. As I said it's quite long to be explained so we stop here.

Inspired by my thoughts about computers, some AI research materials and the questions we are asking after watching the Matrix. Whether it's ok to give free will to the AI programs or we should leave them “mindless”?!