Logic Theorist - Philosophical Implications

Philosophical Implications

Pamela McCorduck writes that the Logic Theorist was "proof positive that a machine could perform tasks heretofor considered intelligent, creative and uniquely human." And, as such, it represents a milestone in the development of artificial intelligence and our understanding of intelligence in general.

Simon famously told a graduate class in January 1956, "Over Christmas, Al Newell and I invented a thinking machine", and would write:

invented a computer program capable of thinking non-numerically, and thereby solved the venerable mind-body problem, explaining how system composed of a matter can have the properties of mind.

This statement, that machines can have minds just as people do, would be later named "Strong AI" by philosopher John Searle. It remains a serious subject of debate up to the present day.

Pamela McCorduck also sees in the Logic Theorist the debut of a new theory of the mind, the information processing model (sometimes called computationalism). She writes that "this view would come to be central to their later work, and in their opinion, as central to understanding mind in the twentieth century as Darwin's principle of natural selection had been to understanding biology in the nineteenth century." Newell and Simon would later formalize this proposal as the physical symbol systems hypothesis.