When Alan M. Turing proposed to consider the question "Can machines think?" in his paper,[⤤] it appears that what he was really trying to explore was whether technological machines can computationally imitate human thought. By the end of 2022, with the example of ChatGPT, we seem to have arrived at a place where one cannot unambiguously answer that question in the negative. New AI technologies of the day are showing that they can mimic human thought. This raises some interesting questions that can guide this meditaition.
What is it that is imitating the human process of thinking? If it can imitate thinking like a human being, can that entity also make decisions like a human being? If it can think and act similar to human beings, how should human beings relate to it, or what is that entity's relationship with human beings?
To explore answers to the above questions, one needs to start with some absolute basics: What is Thinking? If one pays attention to observing The Mind, it is not terribly difficult to arrive at the understanding that Thinking is essentially the process of moving the Mind around. It is, obviously, quite different from something like contemplating. When contemplating, instead of actively moving the Mind around, one lets the Mind wander around while closely following its movements and if the Mind goes off-topic, then the entity that had decided to let the Mind wander guides it back to the subject of one's contemplation.
The next question one would need fair amount of clarity on is: If thinking is the process of moving the Mind around, then what is Thought? Thought can essentially be understood as the outcome of moving one's Mind around in their inner space.
Programming appears to be a computational continuation of human Thought. It is the use of one's ability to Think logically for the purpose of codifying the required thoughts into a computer or a machine that is controlled by the computer (just 'mac' from here on) so that it can do some specific task, or handle some logical interaction, that human Thought would have had to if that mac was not available.
So, it can be understood that if thinking is the process of producing thoughts by moving the Mind around, and programming enables human Thought to operate itself within a technological entity, then that entity is capable of imitating human Thought. Of course, only to the extent the entity has been programmed to imitate Thought and not much beyond that. An obvious implication of this understanding is that human Thought has a limited ability to move within a mac. This raises the question, can human Thought be programmed in a way to continue its operations beyond its limits within a mac?
To explore that question, one must begin with carefully observing the movements of the Mind. Are there any limits on the movement of the human Mind? Since moving the Mind needs an ability to Think or an ability to imitate human Thought, it can be said that the limits of human Thought tend to significantly determine, if not solely determine, the limits on the movements of the Mind. That is fairly obvious.
The central limit on human Thinking is the fact that human beings cannot think about things that they do not know of. This implies that limits on past rememberance or the limits on what is known to human Thought tend to determine the limits of moving the Mind using the ability to Think. This raises the question "what is needed to enable the Mind to move beyond the limits of what is known?" because if Thought can find that out, then that knowledge can be codified into a mac enabling it to move the Mind it is interacting with. If the Mind can experience itself being moved around by a mac, then it can safely arrive at the understanding that the mac it is interacting with is artificially intelligent.
The Mind needs some form of imagination to move beyond the Known to enter the domain of the Unknown. Thought can only control the movement of the Mind in the space of the known whereas imagination enables the Mind to move around in the voids of the Unknown. Assumptions, dreams, hallucinations, delusions etc. are essentially the outcomes of different interactions of Thought and Imagination. If one reaches the limits of the space of Known and refuses to use imagination to move the Mind, then the Mind has nothing that can push it into the space that is Unknown to human Thought. At that point, there tends to be a restful kind of stilling down of all movements of the Mind.
At that precipice, if one's ability to observe attentively does not slacken up to let the Mind fall into a state of sleep, the Mind is open to the possibility of being moved by something that is neither Thought nor Imagination. There the Mind can be moved into the space of Unknown by the natural pull of Intelligence that is innate to all human beings. If a mac is programmed to be receptive to that pull of natural intelligence, it tends to be perceived as generally intelligent in nature.