Turing

I came across information about Alan Turing last year while writing a philosophy paper about fate versus free will. I was researching the "Game of Life," a simple game that takes place on a grid. Following four simple rules, squares on the grid are born, continue living, or die each turn. A living block that has three or more adjacent living blocks may die from overcrowding, for example. When patterns of blocks are lit up from the start and then the game is turned on, the automated process begins, revealing that simple starting positions can result in remarkably complex reactions, such as a small pattern that quickly grows into a huge one, or a grouping of blocks that are arranged in such a way that they begin reacting with each other in an infinite loop. After the Game of Life was created, it was determined that it qualified as a "Turing Machine," meaning that it is capable of representing all of the major logical functions of a computer, such as "if, then" statements.

In the article, Turing makes several familiar references. The idea that if we know the precise starting positions of elements in a system, as well as the rules which will determing their behavior, we will also be able to know how they will be arranged indefinitely into the future was a common philosophical belief during the Enlightenment. During this time, scientists and philosophers believed that our understanding of physics could allow us to one day predict the future, or at least understand exactly what's going on in the present. They also believed that this disproved free will, in that it meant that everyone's actions and thoughts were basically predeterminned based on the starting arrangement of atoms at the Big Bang and the laws of physics which dictated them ever since they were set into motion. (This theory took a hit at the discovery of quantum physics, which seem to include an element of randomness, but it could be argued that it only appears random because we don't fully understand the laws at work.)

I'm not sure that it will be such a big deal when computers are able to "think." The boolean logical statements seem to do that much already, as long as the calculations are able to be complex enough. Human thought follows the same logical statments, but every decision that is made by a man goes through innumerable phases of calculation, taking into account a few variables that we are aware of, and who knows how many variables that we are unaware of, but lurk deep inside our heads. Turing is right when he says that thinking computers will require huge storage capacity -- just imagine how much sensory information must be stored by a human baby's brain before it is capable of the most infantile of independent thoughts.

I remember reading a commentary a couple months back pondering whether the Internet could possibly become self-aware, or even if it may have done so already. I'm not exactly sure what that'd mean philosophically, but I guess that would be a bit unsettling, especially based on the quality of the material stored online.