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An Inquiry into Divers Principles of Art-making Minds and Machines, Being an Essay on Turing in the Chinese Room
- Philosophy and Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 38, Number 1A, October 2014
- pp. A94-A113
- 10.1353/phl.2014.0038
- Article
- Additional Information
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In this essay I revisit the two most famous thought experiments in the cognitive sciences of the twentieth century: the Turing test and the Chinese Room scenario. Dealing a series of death blows to the latter, I argue that Turing’s famous test has been largely misunderstood by generations of analysts. Rather than an analytical definition of machine thinking, it is an inductive protocol for generating inferential evidence about machine thinking. In the second part of the essay I take an evolutionary route to inquire into machines’ potential for being creative, leading me to several conclusions about the nature of human and machine art.