Philosophy of Mind
Hillis asserts that parallelism itself is approximately the main ingredient of intelligence; that there is not anything else required to make a mind result from a distributed network of processors. Hillis believes that
...intelligence is just a whole lot of little things, thousands of them. And what will happen is we'll learn about each one at a time, and as we do it, machines will be more and more like people. It will be a gradual process, and that's been happening.
This is not so different from Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind theory, which holds that mind is a collection of agents, each one taking care of a particular aspect of intelligence, and communicating with one another, exchanging information as required.
Some artificial intelligence theorists have other opinions – that it's not the underlying computational mode that’s crucial, but rather particular algorithms (of reasoning, memory, perception, etc.). Others argue that the right combination of "little things" is needed to give rise to the overall emergent patterns of coordinated activity that constitute real intelligence.
Hillis is one of a small number of people who have made a serious attempt to create such a "thinking machine" and his ambitions are clear:
"I'd like to find a way for consciousness to transcend human flesh. Building a thinking machine is really a search for a kind of Earthly immortality. Something much more intelligent than we can exist. Making a thinking machine is my way to reach out to that."
Read more about this topic: W. Daniel Hillis
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