St John's College Thinking Machines Seminar, July 2025

St John's College Science Institute | A Week with Thinking Machines
Tutors: Halley Barnet and Brendon Lasell   -   July 7-11, 2025

The seminar studied the nature of the thinking machine. Together, we read philosophical and scientific texts from the past three centuries that have investigated and proposed machines that represent, model, and even simulate human thought.

Introductory question:  In the Discourse on Method, Descartes famously predicated our existence as human beings on our ability to think: “I think therefore I am.” He went on to argue that no matter the sophistication of our mechanical imitations of man, they would forever fall short of the capacity to reason. An astute observer of recent developments in artificial intelligence might be tempted to conclude that Descartes was mistaken, that we have indeed succeeded in creating machines that can reason and think.

• Monday - Early Modern 

  • Blaise Pascal, Arithmetic Machine, 1645 

  • Conversation Between Diderot and d’Alembert 1769

• Tuesday - Analytical Engine by Babbage: 1842 

  • Menabrea, Sketch of the Analytical Engine 

  • Ada Lovelace, Notes on "Sketch of the Analytical Engine"

• Wednesday - Mechanics of the Mind 

  • McCulloch and Pitts; Logical Calculus in Neurons, 1943 

  • Von Neumann, The Computer Brain, 1958

• Thursday - Computers at Work 

  • Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950 

  • Samuel, Machine Learning for Checkers, 1959

• Friday - What does it mean to understand? 

  • Searle: Minds, brains and programs 1980 

  • Chalmers, Could an LLM Be Conscious? 2022

Summary of the readings and mindmaps below developed by George Percivall based on the Seminar