THE POSSIBILITY OF MACHINE INTELLIGENCE AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF HUMAN-MACHINE COMMUNICATION

One of the neglected topics in the few studies on the foundations of Artificial intelligence is the nature of human-machine communication and the nature of machine intelligence. The major contribution of this paper is showing that human-machine communication is impossible and pinpointing the logical consistency of this conclusion with both that of the attainability of machine intelligence and that of the possibility of human-human communication. To reach our conclusions we: (a) assume that the mind-brain identity theory, and the theory of evolution hold true; and (b) appropriately define the notions of "machine intelligence" and "communication". Our definition of machine intelligence is based upon the key requirement that, to be appropriate, such a definition must capture the evolving characteristics of machine intelligence. The cornerstone for an appropriate definition of communication is the notion of understanding. To this end we first define communication in terms of understanding and subsequently define and justify the notions of human-understanding, machine-understanding, and understanding.