"Human intelligence and artificial intelligence: perspectives", so read the degree scroll of the seminar that this March has organized the group of research Science, Reason and Faith (CRYF) of the University of Navarra. The speaker, Manuel Alfonseca, PhD in Telecommunications Engineering and graduate in Computer Science, has extensive professional experience in the world of business (IBM) and in the academic world: he has been a professor at the Universities of Complutense University y Autónoma of Madrid, where he has been Full Professor and director of the Escuela Politécnica Superior.

Professor Alfonseca introduced seminar by talking about the limits of mathematics and its attempts at formalization. He explained what the halting problem, the Turing test and the Turing test test and the Searle's Chinese room. He stated that "there are problems that cannot be solved; one of them is chance". He explained that mathematically it is not possible to decide whether a sequence of events is true or false chance. He pointed out that this result has important consequences in the discussion determination of whether the universe is the result of design or chance, since such a determination, from a mathematical point of view, would be impossible.

Artificial intelligence is applied to games such as chess, expert systems and natural language, although it encounters the problem of teaching a machine natural language, which is inherently ambiguous, something that does not happen in artificial languages. To illustrate this ambiguity, he gave the example of sentences such as: "See you tomorrow at the bank". Man is able to speak with semantic as well as syntactic ambiguity: "I will spend this summer alone here".

According to Turing, "artificial intelligence would be achieved at the moment when a machine becomes capable of deceiving a human in the same way as one human deceives another". The problem is that this test does not detect consciousness, he added. 

"Consciousness is more than complexity and information. It is also intentionality. We have intentions that are incompatible with determinism." Man is a free being. "Freedom of decision requires an indeterministic substrate." At final, what we cannot do is, according to Alfonseca, download the consciousness of a living being in a computer support. "If computers had consciousness, we would have to redefine life," concluded speaker.

At colloquium he added that "artificial intelligence lacks not only awareness, but also semantics. Recognizing a person's natural language is not trivial. The computer would recognize a joke, although it is one thing for it to recognize it and another for it to find it funny."