THE AGE OF INTELLIGENT MACHINES Chapter 2: Philosophical Roots

"Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it's clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn't really philosophical to begin with." "The chance of the quantum theoretician is not the ethical freedom of the Augustinian." "There's something queer about describing consciousness: whatever people mean to say, they just can't seem to make it clear. It's not like feeling confused or ignorant. Instead, we feel we know what's going on but can't describe it properly. How could anything seem so close, yet always keep beyond our reach?" How can mind arise from nonmind? In examining human thought through the ages, philosophers appear to have gone down one of two paths. One school of thought, which we might call mind as machine, starts with the observation that human thought takes place in the human brain. The brain, in turn, is made up of tens to hundreds of billions of neurons. Neurons, while not simple structures, can nonetheless be fully understood as biochemical machines. Our brain thus consists of billions of biochemical machines interacting with each other, a fact from which we can draw two conclusions.