One of the highly contraversial discussions in philosophy of mind is equivalence of human being mind and machines.
Here we show that no one could prove that, in certain he is a machin

Didehvar, Farzad

Zareepour, Mohammad Saleh

English

Cognitive Sciences ePrint Archive

A proof in Mind-Machine Equivalence 
 
Farzad Didehvar 
 
Department of computer science and Mathematics, Amirkabir University Of 
Technology,P.O Box 15875-44-13, Tehran, Iran 
didehvar@cic.aut.ac.ir 
 
 
Mohammad Saleh Zarepour 
 
Department of Mathematical sciences, Sharif University of Technology, 
P.O Box 11365-9415, Tehran, Iran 
ms_zarepour@yahoo.com 
 
This is about the proof which is demonstrated in the article 
 Epistemological Observations about 
Mind-Machine Equivalence 
which is written by the authors. 
 
 
We want to demonstrate here; no one could prove in a certain way that 
he is a machine.  
 
In brief the argument says: 
Suppose I believe that "I am a machine”, and my name is "X". The above 
means if some one asks me "are you a machine?" or more exactly "Is X a 
machine?" I will answer him "yes". Just now we consider this belief as 
a plausible one, and we show how it will lead us to this fact that its 
negation is plausible also. To put forward our argument, we can easily 
design a machine which if it faces the same question ("Is X a 
machine?") it replies back "NO". We can consider this machine in such a 
way that its function would be simply as following: when we supply it 
by the question "Is X a machine?" as input the out put would be "NO", 
and by supplying the other inputs our machine halts with no output. Now 
the question is: Between X and Y which of them are right? To answer 
this question, we should have a faire position to judge, the problem 
is: "The referee himself, is one of the competitors." So, any 
measurement of judgment and the standards of fairness are based on his 
opinion and it will not be faire, since "Y" has not the same opinion. 
In fact we define Y so simple, such that it couldn't have any opinion 
about these measurements, unless the measurement declares X is not a 
machine, which couldn't be declared by "X". Therefore there is no faire 
position, and no way to prove the declarations of whom(X or Y) is more 
plausible. In other word, for me(X), to be machine is as plausible as 
not to be a machine, so I can’t be sure that I am a machine.  
After all above, we conclude that either the belief of X is not 
plausible, or it is as plausible as its negation. 
 
As conclusion, our main claim is 
 
 
(**)   "I never could be certain that I am a machine". 
 
 
Behind the above argument there are some presupposes. The First is 
called by * principal. Base on this principal, we say that the 
plausibility of assertions between X and Y are comparable. If you don't 
accept this point, and thinking that they are not comparable, in 
consequence, there will be no reason to prefer one of the assertions to 
the other. Again the X assertion is as plausible as Y so we couldn’t 
prefer one and reject the other. So we have used in our argument * 
principal, but the conclusion finally is independent of accepting this 
principal or rejecting that, our main claim will be held. In words 
*principal is 
Let A and B be two machines, A and B are comparable respect to the amount of cognition and 
reasonability and justifiability of them. 
 
 
The second principal, whom we mention here, on the contrary to the 
first, is essential to be held: "For any judgment between two matters, 
we need a faire position between them". 
We think the only way to escape from the above argument and (**), is to 
tackle somehow this presuppose. By doing that we fall in some selfish 
type of thinking, which we know our idea and our thinking is sufficient 
to find the truth and we need no comparison to the other ideas. It 
means I know myself as an absolute measure and there is no need to 
compare myself to the others. Personally, we are against this point of 
view. The reason is, the way that the infrastructure of our knowledge 
has been formed. We didn't make that alone, we did it in society and by 
comparing and borrowing the other ideas. So by accepting this new point 
of view, we should recast whole structure of our knowledge, but it 
seems, even if we succeed to do that, what will be done would be very 
weak. In fact it will be very similar to the structure of knowledge of 
a person which is born in an isolated island and he rest there all of 
his life. It is doubtful such a person achieves any language unless it 
will be very naive. Intuitively, it is near to impossible, this person 
could ask himself a question like: Is he, himself a machine or not? 
In the end, as conclusion, anyone has two logical ways respect to the 
problem of equivalence, either accepting the above exaggerated 
solipsistic idea, or he never could be certain that he is a machine. 
Due to the above considerations, we suppose that, only the second case 
seems to be a reasonable one. 
 
 
 


Epistemological Observations about Mind-Machine Equivalence

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