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Will computers ever be able to solve philosophy problems and should they? If they could, would they give better answers than humans?
Accepted:
August 8, 2013

Comments

Allen Stairs
August 8, 2013 (changed August 8, 2013) Permalink

I think the best answers to your questions are, in order, we don't know, why not, and we don't know.

A bit less tersely: you're asking about the capabilities that computers might one day come to have. In particular, you're asking whether they'll ever be able to pass a philosophy version of the Turing Test (that is: will they ever be able to give response that a philosopher couldn't distinguish from the ones given by flesh-and-blood philosophers.) I'd be very skeptical of any a priori argument meant to show that this is impossible. And I'd keep in mind that it's a mistake to think that the only way this could happen is for the answers to be "programmed into" the computer.

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