Computers beat the best human chess players. Computers guide spacecraft over vast distances and direct robotic devices to explore faraway astronomical bodies. Computers outpace humans in many respects, but are they actually intelligent? Can they think? Even if one is skeptical about the mentality of today's computers, the interesting philosophical issue remains: Might computers possess significant intelligence someday? Indeed, might computers feel or even have consciousness? And, how would we know?

The Historical Debate

These issues of machine intelligence are not new to philosophy. The debate about whether a machine might think has its philosophical roots in the seventeenth and eighteenth century with the development of modern science. If the universe is fundamentally materialistic and mechanistic, as the emerging scientific paradigm suggested, it would follow that humans are nothing more than machines. Possibly, other machines might be constructed that would be capable of thought as well...