Human-like Computers - A Lesson in Absurdity

Some 50 years ago, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum found that the idea that the socialization of a machine might in any way be comparable to the one of a human, is a sign of the madness of our time. Today, the idea is mostly not seen as a mad but rather as a quite plausible one, as are many other ideas about human-likeness of computers, like them having consciousness. At a closer look, however, the alleged human-likeness of computers is merely derived from weak analogies, like them having intelligence just because they can play chess (and nothing else). The book details the psychological and physiological preconditions for human mental functions to occur, ones that cannot possibly be fulfilled by computers. It puts the computers-as-humans issue into the broader philosophical frame of the scientistic view that man is basically a machine.

About the author

Manfred Velden studied Psychology at the Universities of Bonn and Berkeley (University of California) and is professor at the Universities of Mainz, Berlin (TU) and Osnabrück. His main research and publication fields lie in Biological Psychology, particularly the critique of the biologistic approach in general and heritability in particular.

Product details

• Authors: Manfred Velden
• Publisher: Schwabe Verlag Basel
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.12.2021
• EAN: 9783796545252
• ISBN: 978-3-7965-4525-2
• No. of pages: 128
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 20 mm x 200 mm
• Weight: 219 g
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Psychology; Non-fiction book > Psychology, esoterics, spirituality, anthroposophy > Applied psychology; Philosophie des Geistes, Das Selbst, das Ich, Identität und Persönlichkeit, machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Bewusstseinszustände, Turing Test, robots, Neural Networks, consciousness, Computer simulation, machine intelligence, Automatic translation