The question that has hung in our minds throughout this entire course is whether or not machines can think. According to Turing, if they are able to at least create the illusion of thought, it the machine can trick a person into believing it can think, then the machine must be able to think. Searle diagreed, however, saying that it would be impossible to create “strong artificial intelligence” because, although a machine might be able to create the illusion of thought, there can never truly be a thinking machine, as a machine could never understand what it is thinking. These two cognitive scientists create opposing arguments: once claiming that artificial intelligence is a possibility dependent only on the right technology; the other saying that a thinking machine is never possible because it is programmed with a certain amount of rules and constraints and thus could never actually understand or really think. It would seem, though, that Searle is right: that although a machine can create the illusion of humanity, it can never truly achieve it. In Villiers’ Tomorrow’s Eve, Hadaly is the ideal illusion of feminity: it would seem that she has a soul and a mind capable of all the things a human is. Yet, when it comes down to it, she is merely a machine. She is composed not of flesh and blood, but of cylinders and metal. Her thoughts are nothing but inscriptions on a cylinder deep within her metal exterior: they are not the result of some more complex and profound phenomenon as human intelligence is. Also, in Casares The Invention of Morel, the fugitive falls victim to the illusion of the machine. Yet, what he experiences, although Faustine and her fellow vacationers supposedly have a soul, they are bodiless illusions of their former incarnations. They live the same week over and over again, becasue they have been programmed to do so. If they were confronted with some uknown, they could not react to it because it has not been programmed into their being. Thus, one must only come to the conclusion that thought is, at least for the time being, a phenomenon reserved for humanity.
