Philosophers have been trying for over two thousand years to understand and
resolve two big questions of the universe: how does a human mind work, and
can non-humans have minds? However, these questions are still unanswered.
Some philosophers have picked up the computational approach originated by
computer scientists and accepted the idea that machines can do everything that
humans can do. Others have openly opposed this idea, claiming that such
highly sophisticated behaviour as love, creative discovery and moral choice will
always be beyond the scope of any machine.
The nature of philosophy allows for disagreements to remain unresolved. In
fact, engineers and scientists have already built machines that we can call
‘intelligent’. So what does the word ‘intelligence’ mean? Let us look at a
dictionary definition.
1 Someone’s intelligence is their ability to understand and learn things.
2 Intelligence is the ability to think and understand instead of doing things
by instinct or automatically