Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; author, The Cognitive Brain
Machines (humanly constructed artifacts) cannot think, because no machine has a point of view—that is, a unique perspective on the worldly referents of its internal symbolic logic. We, as conscious cognitive observers, look at the output of so-called thinking machines and provide our own referents to the symbolic structures spouted by the machine. Of course, despite this limitation, such nonthinking machines have provided an extremely important adjunct to human thought.