Watson Descartes Said That What

¶ … Watson

Descartes said that what he learned -- and accepted as "supremely true" he learned "either from the senses or through the senses," though, at times, he senses managed to deceive him (Descartes 2010, p. 136). For Descartes, what would make humans different from a machine would be not the fact that we have distinct bodies, but the fact that we have a distinct sense of having a body. In the case of the IBM computer Watson, one cannot consider it as a 'thinking' machine if thinking in terms of Descartes' philosophy. Descartes, after all, was a rationalist and it would not be rational to think that a machine could 'think' like a human because it lacked a soul, which is what informs our human experience and allows us to learn from it. Hume, an empiricist, believed that knowledge is based almost wholly on one's own senses and experiences. Watson does not have any kind of experience or any sense of what is going on around it. As seen in his Jeopardy! challenge, Watson is only able to take clues (words) from the sentence and then search its database for the answers. Though Watson nearly always found the answers, it is absurd to think of Watson as having the same type of intelligence as humans because his intelligence is based on something that is only made up of machinery and algorithms. There is nothing intelligent about Watson but, rather, it is all about calculation (Fish 2011). According to Hume, all real knowledge must come through real experience. While Descartes came to his position on what constituted real knowledge through rationally considering the topic, Hume is all about the experience (and a computer doesn't have an experience, it only exists as a piece of machinery). Watson cannot hear, smell, taste, see or sense anything. There is no confinement, per se, because nothing cannot be confined (so it can't be assumed that Watson is confined to his little box of machinery -- or whatever it is -- because Watson does not exist).

Despite the fact that Watson is not human, will never be human, and should not be thought of as having human capabilities in terms of thought, Watson's appearance on Jeapordy! alongside two of the show's best contestants ever, Lenchner (2011) notes some very human nuances to Watson's question answering process. For example, Watson was able to, from lack of a better phrase, 'learn from his mistakes.' Lenchner (2011) states that these examples are seen very clearly in the sparring matches with the two contestants. "Not only does Watson get better at answering as clues in a category are revealed, but its understanding of its own in-category ability is also refined" (2011). What this shows is that Watson stands up to Turing's test. Watson beat two of Jeopardy!'s best contestants in the show's history, which is an especially difficult feat considering the game show's difficult concept (seeing an answer and formulating its correct question). Had the audience not known that Watson was a computer and if Watson had been obscured from sight, would people have believed that a human sat behind a black curtain? Probably, but just because it can fool us doesn't mean that it is so. One can pretend to be the King of Spain and some might even believe him, but saying one is the king and actually being the king are not the same thing.

Going back to Hume's idea that one can only learn from experience, it is interesting to consider some questions related to this topic. If one is to order an amazing cheeseburger made with Kobe beef and topped with gruyere cheese and heirloom tomatoes, then delicately set upon a freshly made roll, still hot from the oven, and taste this delicious burger, can that experience be related to someone (or Watson) and its delicious nature ever truly be known by the person (or thing) without ever really experiencing it? Hume would argue that one can't. Even if someone knew every single detail about this burger, the person would never have tasted it and thus there would be some knowledge lacking. That is, the knowledge would not be complete. This is where the human part comes in. The explanation of the details of this burger would mean nothing if the person hadn't indeed tasted it. That being said, as the burger's details were passed along to different individuals, even more of its true nature would be lost.