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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2025
Introduction
Is it possible for a machine to think? At first glance, this question may appear to be about the possible future capacities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Indeed, the recent public discussion on ChatGPT, other AI systems and the future of this technology has, to a great extent, been concerned with that question. However, there is also a philosophically more profound question about what we mean when we say that something is thinking. Answering this philosophical problem is also crucial for building machines or computers with thinking capacities if we wish to create such machines. We must first analyse the conditions under which we would say something – or someone – is thinking. Only after that can we ask what psychological or artificial processes are needed for this to be the case.
Philosophers who discussed this issue during the early days of computers include Alan Turing, who famously argued for the possibility of thinking machines, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who drew the opposite conclusion. Despite their differences, the two seem to agree on how thinking should be attributed. This chapter returns to what they wrote about thinking and why they disagreed. We will bring some lessons from Wittgenstein and Turing on how we should think about thinking. Moreover, we shall apply their ideas to contemporary robotics and AI discussions and engineering. Also, we outline a view on thinking machines that bridges Turing's optimism and Wittgenstein's scepticism on whether a machine could be said to think.
Our primary objective is not to settle a conceptual dispute between Wittgenstein and Turing. Our main goal lies in the opposite direction: to contribute to the discussion on the philosophy of robotics and AI. We approach the problem of thinking machines by identifying what Wittgenstein and Turing agree on and then apply what we have learned to the current debate on AI and robotics. In particular, we consider the idea of modelling robots according to an enactivist conception of thinking (see, e.g. Varela et al. 1991; Noë 2004; Rohde 2010; Stewart et al. 2010; Hutto and Myin 2012; Gallagher 2017; Egbert and Barandiaran 2022; Lassiter 2022). According to enactivism, cognition does not primarily consist of the internalist processing of represen-tations.
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