According to the conventional wisdom, Turing said that computing machines can be intelligent. I don't believe it. I think that what Turing really said was that computing machines –- computers limited to computing –- can only fake intelligence. If we want computers to become genuinelyintelligent, we will have to give them enough “initiative” to do more than compute. In this paper, I want to try to develop this idea. I want to explain how giving computers more ``initiative'' can allow them (...) to do more than compute. And I want to say why I believe that they will have to go beyond computation before they can become genuinely intelligent. (shrink)

Shanks and St. John (1994a) suggest that From the viewpoint of a computer scientist who tries to construct learning systems, that claim seems rather implausible. In this commentary I wish to suggest why, in the hopes of shedding light on the relationship between consciousness and learning.

To convince us that computers cannot have mental states, Searle (1980) imagines a “Chinese room” that simulates a computer that “speaks” Chinese and asks us to find the understanding in the room. It's a trick. There is no understanding in the room, not because computers can't have it, but because the room's computer-simulation is defective. Fix it and understanding appears. Abracadabra!