The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

Physics regards you as a collection of molecules in a radiant energy field, and there is, in strict physics, nothing else. Democritus (b. around 460 bc) said in ancient Greek times, “All is atoms and void.” This is the stance of the hard ai people; there is no essential difference between machines and humans, hence by suitably programming machines, the machines can do anything humans can do. Their failures to produce thinking in significant detail is, they believe, merely the failure of programmers to understand what they are doing, and not an essential limitation. At the other extreme of the ai scale, some of us, when considering our own feelings, believe we have self-awareness and self-consciousness—though we are not able to give satisfactory tests to prove these things exist. I can get a machine to print out “I have a soul” or “I am self-aware” or “I have self-consciousness,” and you would not be impressed with such statements from a machine. But from humans you are inclined to give greater credence to such remarks, based on the belief that you, by introspection, feel you have such properties (things), and you have learned by long experience in life that other humans are similar to you—though clearly racism still exists, which asserts there are differences, me being always the better person!