Wright Summary

In Robert Wright's article "Can Machines Think? Maybe So, as Deep Blue's Chess Prowess Suggests", the author thesis is about conciousness. Wright compared the difference between a human's mind and a machine. The subject of consciousness that Wright chose to speak of is mind-blogging. It is a subject that can be viewed through different point of views.

Wright's focus was on the function of a machine and the human mind. One of the example he chose to write about was the man vs machine (Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Blue in a chess game). A game of chess is a game that requires a lot of thinking and strategies. The mass amount of thinking is believe to be affiliated with consciousness. But at the same time, a game of chess has endless options and strategies and therefore a computer can only calculate the best possible move. With that being said, a computer can not freely think and therefore doesn't have consciousness. Wright also took other philosphers' view as part of his discussion of consciousness. One of the things that jumped out at me was the idea of a machine having human emotions. A machine can't feel pain, love or pleasure. And I can't say that it is able to calculate the amount of each emotion also.

In conclusion, I do not believe that machine have consciousness because the can not mimic human emotions. "...consciousness-the existence of pleasure and pain, love and grief..." (pg. 144) With this definition of consciousness, a machine that can not mimic these emotions can not be consider to be conscious. After all, machine can only calculate numbers and put those numbers is strategies. It can't pass the Turing test because it does not know any common sense.