Can Artificial Intelligence Think? Is AI a Mind?

Is AI a mind? It's not. It mimics a mind. But why? Think about a calculator. You put in some numbers and it pops something on the screen. Now, the calculator doesn't know what it's doing. It is doing addition and multiplication, and it's showing you numbers on a screen. But it doesn't know what addition and multiplication is and it doesn't know that it is um what it's showing you. It just prints it on a screen. You need a mind to interpret what it's showing on the screen and um and to give meaning to that. So the mind is a kind of thing that when it sees something, it knows what it is. So AI could look at the screen on a calculator and then do some calculation on it, but it doesn't know what a number is and it doesn't know um what it's saying to you. So it can put the correct definition of a number, but it still doesn't know what that definition means. And there's a proof for that. Um, so this is not just a hypothetical, but there's a proof for it because material is never a symbol for something else. Um, inherently, right? So this is the same thing with the brain versus the mind. The brain is not your mind. The mind is an immortal um thing with the power to know what something is. And the brain can't do that. The brain can have a configuration of neurons. It can store um it can store a representation of a thought, a memory. It can store a memory. It can store a representation of what you're seeing right now. But like a calculator, the brain doesn't know what that representation is. A stop sign doesn't know it's a stop sign. It doesn't know uh what the that uh it doesn't know that it's red and white paint and that it has letters on it. Nothing uh no material thing is inherently a symbol for something else. uh philosophers have known this for hundreds of years uh that there is no way for something to inherently mean something else. A carbon atom can't say I'm really about that thing over there, which is what symbols are. All right, it's just a quick analysis. AI, not a mind. It simulates a mind. It may even um you know do some things better than our mind but it is not a mind. Quick addendum here. This is also the difference between humans and animals. Uh and also robots, right? So, like a calculator, a robot, you know, you can get one of those fancy vacuum robots and it can vacuum the floor for you and it can even do that somewhat intelligently, but it's not conscious of what it's doing. It doesn't know what it is doing. Uh, an animal is the same kind of thing. Sometimes people think oh animals and humans are different differ by how smart they are and that's not the case. Uh they differ by the kind of um apprehension they have. A human knows what it's doing when it's doing it. But an animal is more like a robot where the robot or like the calculator. The robot and the calculator can do something and it can do something sophisticated but it doesn't know what it's doing. When a an animal eats, it doesn't know that it's eating when it's chasing a sheep to kill it. doesn't know what a sheep is or what chasing is. Um and uh and that's the difference. They're different order of beings that can know what something is versus just simply do something. Part of the confusion comes from animals having feelings and emotions and humans have feelings and emotions too. And so we can connect uh with the animal and uh that's you know the emotions of the animal are real. uh they're really feeling it, but that doesn't mean that they know what they're feeling and uh whereas a human does. Uh the animal may have a real connection and relation to you, but it doesn't know what a relation is or that it has a relationship. Uh so that confuses people into thinking the animal is thinking when um it it it isn't.