The Thinking Machine

“ In them thought has an instrument completely at its own level, but still only a machine, and in memory the working of that machine. We think in names, not in general images, but in terms which only serve as vehicles for mental synthesis and analysis.
It is as such a thinking being—a being who can use language, and manipulate general concepts or take comprehensive views, that man is a rational will. A concept of something to be done—a feeling even of some end more or less comprehensive in its quality, is the implication of what can be called will. ”

“ By thinking, we mean computing, reasoning, and other handling of information. By information we mean collections of ideas—physically, collections of marks that have meaning. By handling information, we mean proceeding logically from some ideas to other ideas—physically, changing from some marks to other marks in ways that have meaning. For example, one of your hands can express an idea: it can store the number 3 for a short while by turning 3 fingers up and 2 down. In the same way, a machine can express an idea: it can store information by arranging some equipment. ”

“ That searching is thinking. But it is a mechanical process. In that word-finder or computer there is no thinker. There is no thinker thinking there at all. If there is any information or anything that is referred to, the computer puts it together and throws it out. That is all that is happening. It is a very mechanical thing that is happening. We are not ready to accept that thought is mechanical because that knocks off the whole image that we are not just machines. It is an extraordinary machine. It is not different from the computers we use. ”

“ It has always seemed to me the greatest folly to devote serious study to the workings of so erratic and incalculable a machine as the human brain. It is a study in which there are, practically speaking, no general rules, no trustworthy data. It is, in my opinion, not a science at all, but a philosophy; and philosophy makes no appeal to me. ”

“ Personal side? You didn't know there was one? Pictured him simply as a thinking machine, a highly specialized instrument of precision, the result of a long series of “adaptations,” as his own jargon would put it? ”

“ That's human nature, I suppose. Small wonder then that my ratio felt outraged as it was confronted with a machine that has a life and has a personality. Come to think of it: Human imagination has always conceived of such machines as a possibility, even a reality—in less rational times than our's that is.... ”

“ Even in what is termed the "noblest effort of the mind," an act of reasoning or inference, we do not create an idea, but only render explicit in a new form of words, ideas already implicitly contained in the words of the propositions employed, as may easily be rendered manifest by mechanical means in Jevons's "Logical Machine;" a proper inference never contains more than its data. In the so-called "creation" of ideas by the imagination also, the new ideas are evolved from old ones, and rendered explicit by mental processes of analysis, combination, permutation, &c. ”

“ Yet it is easy to see that if the mind must use the brain as a machine and work through it, then the mind must be subject to the limitations of its machine, or, in other words, the mind cannot be better than the brain through which it operates. ”

“ There is here no unexpected success, no happy coincidence, no convergence of principles from remote quarters; the philosopher builds the machine, but its parts do not fit; they hold together only while he presses them: this is not the character of truth. ”

“ This is what the human brain does when in the process of reasoning. However, the human brain is swayed by the quirks and angles of personality—likes, dislikes, and training. The machine-brain weighs facts coldly and rationally and comes out with an unbiased answer. You see, machine life is superior to human life in every way—"
Jason Charless glared at the speaker. ”

“ But I see nothing in the human machine, and in the intelligence with which it is endued, that announces very precisely the infinite intelligence of the maker to whom it is ascribed. I see that this admirable machine is liable to be deranged ”

“ Why, “in that he has reason and understanding, with a faculty of will, and so is capable of volition and choice.” True, a machine has no reason or understanding; but suppose it had, would it be a person? By no means. We have seen that the understanding, or the intelligence, is necessarily determined; all its states are necessitated as completely as the movements of a machine. This constitutes an essential likeness, and it is what is always meant, when it is said that necessity makes men mere machines. ”

“ Thus all experience proves, and philosophy testifies, that wherever we get a machine or mechanism of any kind or sort, there must have been a living, conscious being or person, who is distinct from and outside of the machine. He made it, and therefore must have existed before it, in order to make it. Wherever, therefore, we find a mechanism that bears the marks of intelligence and design, of judgment, perception and conception, it is only logical and philosophical to infer, that such a mechanism equally evidences the existence of an intelligent being. ”

“ But instead of appearing merely as an extraneous aid to a defective intelligence, it now presents itself as a machine so complex that a high degree of intellectual power is required for the mere grasp of its construction and method of working. ”

“ You look over different descriptions of the details of the machine, then you think for yourself; you judge for yourself. You revolve all these details within your mind. You analyse, and gradually you begin to handle the machine yourself—practical experience you must acquire. ”

“ Then all worked, and gradually, in the great dome-case, there were stacked the memory-units of the new type, and into these fed all the sensation-ideas of all the science-machines, till nearly a tenth of them were used. Countless billions of different factors on which to work, countless trillions of facts to combine and recombine in the extrapolation that is imagination.
Then—a widely different type of thought-combine, and a greater sense-receptor. It was a new brain-machine. ”

“ That's what intelligence itself is for. You wouldn't build a machine to eat for you, or ... or make love ... or any truly human function. Machines are to help, to amplify, to supplement. That thing is a gigantic memory bank, a symbolic logic manipulator, what you like ”

“ He is aware of the increasingly subordinate position to which he is being relegated, and he is beginning to study the human machine with the same analytical mind with which he has solved so many mechanical problems. ”

“ Machines had imagination of the ideal sort. They had the ability to construct a necessary future result from a present fact. But Man had imagination of a different kind, theirs was the illogical, brilliant imagination that sees the future result vaguely, without knowing the why, nor the how, and imagination that outstrips the machine in its preciseness. Man might reach the conclusion more swiftly, but the machine always reached the conclusion eventually, and it was always the correct conclusion. By leaps and bounds man advanced. ”

“ Another scientific problem to which new machinery for handling information applies is the problem of understanding human beings and their behavior. This increased understanding may lead to much wiser dealing with human behavior. ”

“ But the system is one which has for its object the transformation of reason into instinct the lowering of a rational being into a machine scarcely more intelligent in appearance than some of our own ingeniously-contrived steam-engines. ”

“ In the development of one's innate resources, such as powers of observation, imagination, correct judgment, alertness, resourcefulness, application, concentration, and the faculty of taking prompt advantage of opportunities, the study of the mental machine is bound to be the first step. ”

“ We do not say the machine KNOWS the answer, because it has no purpose of its own in giving the answer: it does not wish to impress you with its cleverness, or feel proud of being such a good machine. But as far as mere accuracy goes, the machine leaves nothing to be desired. ”

“ We think of a thing about which certain facts must obtain, but we do not yet know how the thing will look when it is realized. Thus we conceive of a perpetual-motion machine. It is a quæsitum of a perfectly definite kind,—we can always tell whether the actual machines offered us do or do not agree with what we mean by it. ”

“ Regarded, however, in the purely external way which a study of its mere structure involves, society appears as a machine—that is to say, appears as the work of intelligence indeed, but not as itself instinct with intelligence. ”

“ But no scientific sustained attention is yet given to the real business of living, of smooth intercourse, of self-expression, of conscious adaptation to environment—in brief, to the study of the machine. At thirty the chances are that a man will understand better the draught of a chimney than his own respiratory apparatus—to name one of the simple, obvious things—and as for understanding the working of his own brain—what an idea! As for the skill to avoid the waste of power involved by friction in the business of living, do we give an hour to it in a month? ”

“ It must often have been observed, by those who are at all in the habit of observation of this kind, that the mind operates in this particular like a machine, which, having been wound up, runs on by its own spontaneous action, until it has gone through its appointed course. ”

“ In all cases like this, we are forced, when accounting for phenomena, to move about in a circle, unless we admit the existence of an organic life, of which every individual fact is only the manifestation.119120
It is, also, undeniable, that human insight into the operation and utility of a machine must always precede the existence of the machine itself. This human insight is parent to the plan, and the plan, in turn, is parent to the machine. ”

“ When a man reached his neural capacity we had to erase to put new knowledge in, of course. We'd had a few sad experiences with guys who wanted to know absolutely everything and who went batty from too much EE. To avoid trouble with the law, our operators were strict on that now. ”

“ Surely this is a conclusion from which common sense recoils. Surely, if experience shows that a certain machine, when used to produce a certain effect, does not produce that effect once in a thousand times, but produces, in the vast majority of cases, an effect directly contrary, we cannot be wrong in saying that it is not a machine of which the principal end is to be so used. ”

“ Nature must indeed be a machine if the thinker's knowledge demands uniformity or law, but an instrument of something other than her mechanical self, in short, not a merely revolving, but an evolving, always productive machine, if the knowledge itself is never final. ”

“ This very partial and paltry relation, linking the isolated members to the whole, does not depend on forms that are given spontaneously; for how could a complicated machine, which shuns the light, confide itself to the free will of man? ”

“ It would not be a machine. The idea falls to pieces in our hands. Yet our world is supposed to be just such an infinitely continuous “system.” How does it begin to depend upon and be sufficient unto itself? ”

“ A more scientific physio-psychological observation demonstrates, on the contrary, as I said long ago, that "man is a machine, but he does not function after the fashion of a machine," in the sense that man is a living machine, and not an inorganic machine. ”

“ Man-machines are produced by putting up possible lives before particular individual men, and letting them find out (and finding out for ourselves, too) , day by day, into which life they will grow up.
Everything in a social machine, if it is a machine that really works, is based on the profound and special study of individuals: upon drawing out the aptitudes and motives, choices and genius in each man ”

“ The intuition with which a mathematician sees the solution of a problem would then be a mechanical process, while the slow and bungling hesitation of the tyro in presence of the same problem would be a mental process: the perfection of the organism would thus result in its degradation to the level of a machine! ”

“ Is the power of the mental qualities, to assort, to relate, to compare the ideas presented to it, to draw therefrom just inferences or deductions, and to direct and preserve the volition in a strait line to truth.
It is the great moral excellence of the machine called man; and if this machine is so organized as to allow the perfect operation of judgment, it must, when played upon, ever produce a melodious air. ”

“ Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. ”

“ Accordingly it is able to return as an answer any description of a term111 or class so far as furnished by that proposition in accordance with the Laws of Thought. The machine is thus the embodiment of a true logical system. The combinations are classified, selected or rejected, just as they should be by a reasoning mind, so that at each step in a problem, the Logical Alphabet represents the proper condition of a mind exempt from mistake. It cannot be asserted indeed that the machine entirely supersedes the agency of conscious thought ”

“ Especially does this seem to be true of the brain. We have here an intensely complex machine, composed literally of billions of parts which work together, and in doing so accomplish wonderful results. Of the existence of this machine, much more of the great intricacy of its parts and mechanism, we are quite unconscious. We learn to use it in very early years with an assurance and a perfection that is amazing, considering how complex it is. The less we think about it and its workings, the better does it work and the less disturbance of function is there in its accomplishment. ”