Does Everyone Think, or Is It Just Me?

It has been roughly 60 years since Turing wrote his famous article on the question, “Can machines think?” His answer was that the ability to converse would be a good indication of a thinking computer. This procedure can be understood as an abductive inference: That a computer could converse like a human being would be explained if it had a mind. Thus, Turing’s solution can be viewed as a solution to the other-minds problem, the problem of knowing that minds exist other than your own, applied to the special case of digital computers. In his response, Turing assumed that thinking is a matter of running a given program, not having a special kind of body, and that the development of a thinking program could be achieved in a simulated environment. Both assumptions have been undermined by recent developments in Cognitive Science, such as neuroscience and robotics. The physical details of human brains and bodies are indivisible from the details of human minds. Furthermore, the ability and the need of human beings to interact with their physical and social environment are crucial to the nature of the human mind. I argue that a more plausible solution to Turing’s question is an analogical abduction: An attribution of minds to computers that have bodies and ecological adaptations akin to those of human beings. Any account of human minds must take these factors into consideration. Any account of non-human minds should take human beings as a model, if only because we are best informed about the human case.