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Publication Details

Thinking and Artificial Intelligence

(Original title: Přirozené a umělé myšlení)
Filozofia, 42 (1987), 6, 697-707.
Type of work: Papers - Philosophical-Methodological Problems of Special Sciences
Publication language: Czech
Abstract

The aim of the article is to demonstrate that for understanding and further development of the artificial intelligence it is very important to understand the specifity and the essence of natural thinking and to distinguish it from speech, language and logic.

The author considers speech, language and formal logic as one of the forms of externalization, socialization and materialization of thinking, and these forms are for this reason in their essence the embryonal form of the artificial intelligence, they have a relatively independent life of their own and that is why we are to examine thinking in its immanent form. Thinking as such is the internal integrity of many levels, polarities etc., while each externalized form is an expression often of some quality of thinking, for example discursivity, verbality, analycity, arithmeticality and digital properties of computers, or nonverbality, symbolicity, figurativity, syntheticity, analogicity etc.

The externalized forms of thinking are not considered as finished by the rise of language and logic. On the contrary, they are developed not only by the rise of artificial languages, formal grammars, modern formal logics etc., but also by the rise of various machines for thinking and speaking as well. Till now computers are most perfect product of the development of the externalized forms of thinking. For this reason the question of the mutual relation between thinking and computer is an integral part of a general relation between the creator and his instrument — in the realm of the spiritual activity.

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