DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20448387
Humans as Thinking Machines? Machine and Mindin the Thought of Leibniz
di Hannes Amberger
To what extent are machines capable of emulating human intelligence? Beginning with his reflections on his own mechanical calculator, the present article outlines several ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) concerning this question, which remains highly relevant today. For Leibniz, human beings, animals, and artificial machines resemble one another in their capacity to solve specific problems by employing a determinate scheme of physical operations. Any organism endowed with this capacity may be defined as a “machine” – in this sense, Leibniz describes spiders as “weaving machines” and human beings as contemplative machines. In the case of humans and animals, however, the sequence of bodily operations arises from a corresponding sequence of perceptions within their souls and, ultimately, from their appetition: an inner impulse that entails personal interest and an individual perspective. These, according to Leibniz, would constitute the aspects of human nature that remain inimitable by an artificial machine.
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