philosophy of artificial intelligence

The philosophy of artificial intelligence attempts to answer such questions as:

• Can a machine act intelligently? Can it solve any problem that a person would solve by thinking?
• Are human intelligence and machine intelligence the same? Is the human brain essentially a computer?
• Can a machine have a mind, mental states and consciousness in the same sense humans do? Can it feel how things are?

These three questions reflect the divergent interests of AI researchers, cognitive scientists and philosophers respectively. The scientific answers to these questions depend on the definition of "intelligence" and "consciousness" and exactly which "machines" are under discussion.