Some computer scientists think that they are engaged in studying intelligence. I will here provide an example in Yoshua Bengio who, in an opinion piece for the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail (28th Oct, 2023), has this to say: ‘From my early days as a graduate student in Montreal, I was drawn to an exciting scientific quest: understanding how human intelligence works.’ Bengio says he is losing sleep because, apparently, ‘human level AI might be only a few years or decades away’.
Let us be very clear.
Neither Bengio nor anyone else who would propose to study intelligence through the mechanism by which it supposedly works has ever studied intelligence nor will they ever do so. Artificial Intelligence is nonsense that leads to stupidity if entertained seriously. As such, we must put a stop to this discussion.
The proposed study of how intelligent works is a conceptual muddle and a logical impossibility. It is clear that in proposing that intelligence is something which is a result of the workings of the brain, one cannot be referring to human intelligence. If the brain were to be intelligent, that would have nothing to do with how the human being might be intelligent. This is perhaps easiest to grasp with the example of vision. Philosopher René Descartes already perfectly well understood that one could not explain the vision of a creature by positing that there was something else doing the seeing of the image that came through the eyes. If it is the brain that sees the image that we receive through our eyes, we have thereby not seen anything: the brain, supposedly, has. This leads directly to a further regress of the Cartesian dualism as we should next like to know how the brain can see an optical image. But no one has found eyes or images in the brain, nor been able to give an alternative explanation of how the brain sees things.
The contemporary scientifically minded researcher, however, would like to do without the Cartesian Dualism. That is why it is suggested that the mind “emerges” from the brain. No, they say, mind and body are not two different kinds of things. This idea is expressed by many philosophers, neuroscientists, and computer scientists. Here we will refer to computer scientists Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, who in their book Artificial Intelligence—A Modern Approach list the reductionist question: ‘How does the mind arise from a physical brain?’ (2022, 4th ed, p. 24)
Yet, it is not possible to maintain such a position. For the brain and the creature are not identical, as we have now come to understand: the image which is seen is not seen by the brain. Even if we were, per impossibile, to explain the intelligence of the brain, that would do nothing to explain the intelligence of the creature:
As all evidence suggests that the objective of these scientists is to explain the intelligence, perception, etc., of a creature, and not something else, namely, intelligence* or perception*, it is by definition the case that what these scientists claim to study—namely the intelligence, etc., of the creature— cannot be what they claim to study, namely the intelligence, etc., of the creature. With the proposed study of intelligence in terms of the mechanisms of the brain, the scientist lacks what is the hallmark of science: an object of study. Being engaged in a scientific quest without a possible object of study is nonsense. Such is the epistemological barrier to a scientific-mechanistic study of intelligence. Such a study can only ever be artificial in the sense of being a fabricated mimicry of science, or play-science.
Can machines not be intelligent, just in a different way than humans? No, they cannot. For machines do not know, understand, perceive, learn, or have volition, nor are they conscious.
Can machines not, however, be intelligent, just in a different way than humans? No, they cannot. For machines do not know, understand, perceive, learn, or have volition, nor are they conscious. Attribution of these predicates to machines are all subject to the same criticism as presented here. Furthermore, machines contain information, while humans create and use information. Information itself is not conscious, does not learn, understand, know, or perceive things. Philosopher Anthony Kenny puts this in clear and succinct form in his 1971 essay The Homunculus Fallacy:
‘[I]f having information is the same as knowing, then containing information is not the same as having information. An airline schedule contains the information about airline departures; but the airline schedule does not know the time of departures of the flights. The illiterate slave on whose shaven scalp the tyrant has tattooed his state secrets does not know the information which his head contains.’
It should now be clear to everyone that the idea of artificial intelligence is a confusion and has no scientific validity.