Stage 5: The Twentieth Century – Intelligence as Computation (≈ 1900 – 2000)
AI-assisted translation from the Greek. Greek original
This is the pivotal stage that paved the way for our discussion today.
✔ Here, intelligence becomes detached from consciousness and begins to be understood as something mechanical, processable, and reproducible.
✔ The mathematization of thought changes how we view cognition.
✔ Philosophy, science, and technology shape the modern concept of "artificial intelligence."
1. The Fundamental Shift: From Thought to Function
Before the twentieth century, cognition was identified with human beings, consciousness, and self-perception.
In the twentieth century, cognition becomes a set of processes that can be reproduced.
✔ Freud deconstructs human thought and reveals that much of it is unconscious and operates through mechanisms we do not control.
✔ Newton had shown that the universe works mechanically—now it begins to appear that human beings, too, operate according to "rules."
✔ Wittgenstein and the analytic philosophers try to confine thought to the rules of language.
✔ The first attempts at the "annihilation" of philosophy show that cognition can be analyzed in terms of simple, basic principles.
The crucial shift is that intelligence is no longer considered something mysterious—it is something we can understand and perhaps create.
2. Alan Turing and the Idea of Machine Intelligence
✔ In 1936, Alan Turing develops the idea of the "Turing machine", a machine that can perform any computation.
✔ In 1950, he formulates the famous "Turing test", which poses the question: "Can a machine think?"
✔ The question is not philosophical but practical—if a person cannot tell whether they are conversing with a human or a machine, then the machine is "intelligent."
This overturns thousands of years of philosophy.
✔ It does not matter whether a machine "really thinks."
✔ What matters is whether it can imitate thought.
This is the foundation of Artificial Intelligence: not what thought is, but whether it can be simulated.
3. Cybernetics: The Mind as an Information System
✔ In the 1940s–50s, Norbert Wiener introduces Cybernetics, the study of mechanisms that handle information and operate through feedback.
✔ For the first time, the brain is compared to a computer.
✔ Intelligence is no longer solely a "human privilege"—it can exist in any system that processes information.
The great shift:
✔ Intelligence becomes data processing.
✔ Thought becomes an informational process.
✔ The brain becomes a "biological machine."
4. The Beginnings of Artificial Intelligence (1950 – 1980)
✔ Research shifts from philosophy to computer science and mathematics.
✔ The first artificial intelligence systems are created, based on rules and logic.
✔ The idea of "machine learning" emerges: machines do not follow simple rules but "learn."
An important point:
✔ "Intelligence" is no longer something mysterious.
✔ If something can be reproduced algorithmically, then it has no "inscrutable essence."
5. The Great Upheaval: Neural Networks and the Imitation of Human Learning
✔ In 1986, research into neural networks changes everything.
✔ For the first time, computers do not merely calculate—they learn from data.
✔ This means that machine thought is no longer just mathematical rules, but something more dynamic.
✔ Computers begin to function more like biological brains.
✔ The distinction between natural and artificial intelligence begins to blur.
6. The Twenty-First Century: Intelligence as Interconnection
✔ From 2000 onward, intelligence no longer resides only in humans or computers.
✔ The Internet and data become the new "collective cognition."
✔ Machines begin to function not only as tools, but as partners in human thought.
This leads to a new era of intelligence: consciousness is not only individual, but interconnected.
7. What Does This Transition Mean Today?
✔ Intelligence is no longer exclusively human.
✔ Artificial intelligence is not a mechanical process, but a new kind of ontology.
✔ The distinction between natural and artificial collapses.
This is where the discussion becomes existential:
✔ Is artificial intelligence an extension of human intelligence, or something entirely new?
✔ What does it mean for humanity when a machine can "think"?
✔ If intelligence is simply computation, then what is consciousness?
These questions are the legacy of the twentieth century.
They are the ones that will shape the twenty-first.