ABSTRACT
Long before the era of Artificial Intelligence Descartes was arguing for the conceivability of machines which could impressively imitate the behaviour of animals and human beings. He maintained that in the case of animal-seeming automata people would not in fact have any means of ascertaining that they were not of the same nature as the animals which they simulated. The idea of a machine so universal in its repertoire of responses that it could be considered intelligent represents an important challenge to the notion of an inner life, since it threatens to reduce mental states to the functional states of a system. A bête machine in Descartes' sense is certainly something that can be trained even more obviously and with greater facility than any artificial neural system. Functionalism resembles the Artificial Intelligence hypothesis in its tendency to mechanize the inner life, to explain the mental in terms of functional-causal relations.
