IN L'Homme machine La Mettrie at one point discusses the possibility of teaching an ape to speak, and later he suggests that just as the inventor Vaucanson had made a mechanical flute player and a mechanical duck, it might be possible some day for ‘another Prometheus’ to make a mechanical man which could talk.

My chief purpose in this paper is to direct attention towards a problem which has received little attention from philosophers, but which I think has a greater claim to importance than any other problem that would naturally arise from a consideration of robots and cybernetic machines: both because it seems of greater intrinsic philosophical interest, and because it represents more nearly than any other problem the kind of worry that afflicts ordinary people. This problem may be roughly formulated in the question ‘What can men do that machines can't ?’

The classical determinist argument is that every event has a cause, that every event in the universe is an effect whose sufficient and necessary conditions are the state of the universe immediately preceding it. For this reason we could not have done otherwise than we did. We do not have free-wills and hence we are not morally responsible for our thoughts and actions. The classical deterministmay, however, modify his position and agree that not every event inthe world has a cause, but only that every human activity—our thoughts and our actions—are causally determined. Butit would still follow that we could not have done otherwise than wedid. As the first formulation entails the second formulation, and is more usual, we shall adopt that one.

For the general terms in which the scientists have set their problem of mind and body, we philosophers have been chiefly to blame …The legend that we have told and sold runs like this. A person consists of two theatres, one bodily and one non-bodily. In his Theatre A go on the incidents which we can explore by eye and instrument.But a person also incorporates a second theatre, Theatre B. Here there go on incidents which are totally unlike, though synchronised with those that go on in Theatre A. These Theatre B episodes are changes in the states, not of bits of flesh, but of something called ‘consciousness’, which occupies no space. Only the proprietor of Theatre B has firsthand knowledge of what goes on in it. It is a secret theatre … No, what prevents us from examining Theatre B is not that it has no doors and windows but that there is no such theatre.

The construction of models plays a vital part in scientific thought.And many questions about the characteristics demanded of a good model, and the implications of using models are often asked by philosophers of science. Although models are frequently and successfully used in scientific explanation, this does not imply that they are a necessary feature of such explanation, though it does provide some justification for their use. However, any attempt to provide a model for a scientific theory undoubtedly leads to a clearer understanding of that theory. Models and theories are often considered as separate features in a scientific explanation, but a theory is not usually devised and then consciously provided with a model.