Discuss The general nature of human reason

Keith Gunderson (1964) revived an argument of Descartes’s to the effect that men are not machines, even cybernetic machines, and therefore not merely material. In all known machines the matching or surpassing of a human intellectual ability is a specific outcome of a specific structure. Each skill is a skill at some specific task and no other. But in human beings, intellectual skills are generalized and come in clusters; human reason is a tool for all circumstances.

Thus, it is not proven that the human skill and that of the machine arise from a like inner structure. On the contrary, the reasonable conclusion is that the machine’s skill and the human skill are to be explained in different ways—that is, a person is not any kind of machine.

The reply available to materialists is that this argument is premature. The simulation of human performance by material assemblages is in its infancy. There seems no reason to suppose a machine with generalized skills impossible.