In arguing that machines think, we are in the same fix as Darwin when he argued that man shares common ancestors with monkeys, or Galileo when he argued that the Earth spins on its axis.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.
Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.
The human brain is built to compare; it's Darwinian to consider an alternative when one presents itself.
If you take Darwin's theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify a number of very horrendous things.
We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.
We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.
As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn't really overturn a science paradigm.
Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.
It frequently happens that two persons, reasoning right on a mechanical subject, think alike and invent the same thing without any communication with each other.
We're not all equal, it's simply not true. That isn't science.