"Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time"
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Nagel dismisses the idea that man-made computers, even when excelling at tasks associated with intelligence, can serve as a model for understanding mind. The target is not the engineering feat but the explanatory strategy: equating the reproduction of outward performance with grasping the inner nature of consciousness. When a machine translates, plays chess, or writes fluent prose, it mirrors some external effects of mindedness. But consciousness, for Nagel, centrally involves the subjective point of view, the felt character of experience, the fact that there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. No arrangement of inputs and outputs, however impressive, reveals that inner dimension.
This stance grows out of his broader argument that the objective methods of physical science, powerful as they are, systematically leave out subjectivity. A third-person description can chart neural firings, causal roles, and computational functions, yet still miss what pain feels like or what red looks like to a perceiver. If our scientific picture refuses to include that aspect, mapping the mind onto computer operations becomes a comforting metaphor that displaces the real problem. It turns philosophical difficulty into a technical project and then congratulates itself when the technical project succeeds.
Thus the forecast of a gigantic waste of time is a methodological warning. Efforts that chase behavioral imitation risk deepening confusion between correlation and explanation, between simulation and presence. Nagel does not deny that machines can do remarkable things; he denies that doing those things is the same as having a point of view. His work from What Is It Like to Be a Bat? to Mind and Cosmos presses for an expanded conception of nature that can account for consciousness in its first-person reality. Until a framework can bridge subjective experience and objective description, treating minds as computers that just happen to perform similar tasks will remain a detour rather than a path to understanding.
This stance grows out of his broader argument that the objective methods of physical science, powerful as they are, systematically leave out subjectivity. A third-person description can chart neural firings, causal roles, and computational functions, yet still miss what pain feels like or what red looks like to a perceiver. If our scientific picture refuses to include that aspect, mapping the mind onto computer operations becomes a comforting metaphor that displaces the real problem. It turns philosophical difficulty into a technical project and then congratulates itself when the technical project succeeds.
Thus the forecast of a gigantic waste of time is a methodological warning. Efforts that chase behavioral imitation risk deepening confusion between correlation and explanation, between simulation and presence. Nagel does not deny that machines can do remarkable things; he denies that doing those things is the same as having a point of view. His work from What Is It Like to Be a Bat? to Mind and Cosmos presses for an expanded conception of nature that can account for consciousness in its first-person reality. Until a framework can bridge subjective experience and objective description, treating minds as computers that just happen to perform similar tasks will remain a detour rather than a path to understanding.
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| Topic | Artificial Intelligence |
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