Chapter 027

Chapter 27: THE MIND'S

This is a bit of philosophizing of the kind that an academic philosopher might do in the pub after the seminar. Philosophizing with a claw hammer, so to speak. Ever since seeing "2001: A Space Odyssey" in the late 1960s I have been fascinated by the idea of artificial intelligence (or "machine intelligence" or "electronic intelligence" or "machine consciousness" or any of the other names by which it goes). I wrote a number of short stories about it, eventually a novel called "SIRAT", and more recently was invited to deliver a lecture on it (a very basic introduction to the subject) at an American university. I can't claim to be a genuine worker in the field but I am a very enthusiastic amateur.

The notion of creating some kind of a machine that can think, a conscious computer presumably, collides head on with a genuine and deep philosophical problem. The oldest one in Western philosophy, perhaps. The relationship between the inner world of the mind in which we a