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What Does it Mean to Think?

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titledcterms:titleWhat Does it Mean to Think?
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What?

This essay explored the definition of "think" through the words of Alan Turing in his "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Dennis Dollens in his "Alan Turing's Drawings, Autopoiesis, and Can Buildings Think?", and Marian Mazzone in her "Andy Warhol: Computational Thinking, Computational Process." Turing's definition of "think" landed at "processing things as a human would," while Dollens and Mazzone both defined "think" as something requiring originality. However, it should be noted that Turing's definition evolved over time, with Dollens using some of Turing's own musings from later in his experimentations to define "think," implying that Turing would eventually agree that originality is the crux of true thought.

Inspirations

The biggest inspiration that I got from this paper revolved around originality. I became curious about whether computers and other machines have the ability to be truly creative or original. After this paper, I was interested in figuring out how to integrate mechanic originality in some form into my final project. This wasn't utilized outright in my final project in the end, but I did still run with the underlying questions of what originality and thinking really mean. These questions can be found in the distinction between repeating and non-repeating sections of music in my final project; some parts of my "song-scape" involve many little repeating sections, and some pieces continue to shift and change.

References

Dollens, Dennis. “Alan Turing’s Drawings, Autopoiesis and Can Buildings Think?” Leonardo, vol. 47, no. 3, June 2014, pp. 249–253, https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_00766.
Mazzone, Marian. “Andy Warhol: Computational Thinking, Computational Process.” Leonardo, vol. 53, no. 2, Apr. 2020, pp. 179–182, https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01574.  
Turing, Alan M. “Can Digital Computers Think? (1951).” Oxford Academic, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198250791.003.0019. 
Turing, A. M. “I.—Computing Machinery and intelligence.” Mind, vol. LIX, no. 236, Oct. 1950, pp. 433–460, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/lix.236.433. 
Wing, Jeannette M., Cuny, Jan and Snyder, Larry.  “Computational Thinking Benefits Society.” Social Issues in Computing, New York: Academic Press, 10 Jan. 2014, socialissues.cs.toronto.edu/index.html%3Fp=279.html.
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