The Human Mind in Dialogue With its Replica AI - a Historical Perspective

Although artificial intelligence has exploded for the last couple of years, the idea of comparing the human mind with a computer is not new. One may say that Alan Turing started this movement, and this idea got off to a flying start in psychology through the symposium arranged by the "Special Interest Group in Information Theory" at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sept. 10-11, 1956. This symposium was sponsored by IBM, and Noam Chomsky presented for the first time his ideas about a transformational generative grammar. There were several contributors to the cognitive revolution, but Chomsky's presentation of a linguistic system with a level of precision comparable with mathematics was symptomatic for how a cognitive model for the human mind aimed to be conceptualized. This has brought the question about artificial intelligence to the core of psychology, namely how it can be understood as a model for the human mind. Psychology and its understanding of the human mind have changed along the last 500 years of the Western psychology. After a short presentation of some of the premises for artificial intelligence of today and some aspects of the idea behind the computational mind, these perspectives are compared with the very early use of the term 'psychology' in the early 16th century. The role of classical logic as a model for the human mind was at stake back then and one of the main factors that paved the way for psychology was that Aristotelian logic was criticized and questioned as a model for the human mind. On the other hand, the importance of classical logic has never been completely outdated Consequently, for the last 500 years Western psychology can in many ways be characterized as an incessant battle about the role of logic in the understanding of the human mind. However, the conclusion is that AI of today presupposes an understanding of the human mind that has been outdated for more than 500 years.