Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series | Thinking Machines

Speaker:  Halley Barnet, St. John's College Tutor

Description: Alan Turing once suggested that we consider the mind like an onion. As we strip off as onion skins those "operations which we can explain in purely mechanical terms," will we eventually arrive at the "real" mind, or will we instead discover that there is nothing there behind the mechanism? Over the past three hundred years, we have invented increasingly sophisticated machines that can perform tasks that once fell within the exclusive purview of the human mind: calculation, analysis (mathematical and logical), writing, speech, art. I find myself asking a similar question to Turing’s: are the newfound powers of artificial intelligence so many onions skins, peeling off to reveal an essentially non-mechanical, non-algorithmic, mind underneath? Or are there machines all the way down?

This lecture is part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series - The theme of the series is “Liberal Education in the Age of the LLM.” Nearly every day brings news of “artificial intelligence’s” latest triumph or latest threat. Lost amid the noisy celebrations and denunciations – are the philosophical questions embedded in the very idea of an “artificial intelligence.” Can there be an intelligence that is “artificial”? And if so, how is such intelligence related to human intelligence and human thinking? This lecture series brings together a group of faculty at St John’s College, joined by a colleague in the Computer Science Department at the United States Naval Academy, to examine the foundational questions posed by artificial intelligence. St. John’s is a particularly fine place to host such a series because its program of study is steeped in reflections about the nature of thinking itself, from authors like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and many others. Indeed, St. John’s is uniquely positioned to contribute to and enrich the national conversation about artificial intelligence precisely because it offers an occasion for a reflection upon the foundational works – in philosophy, mathematics, and computation – that contemporary “artificial intelligence” has developed out of. The lecture series is, in that sense, an invitation to step back from news of the latest triumph or threat and to reflect more generally about human thinking and human writing and how it is – or is not – like that done by computers.