Abstract
Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) raise the possibility that humans may not, as classical sociological theory held, be unique among species. A Meadian distinction between brain as a neurological phenomenon and mind as a sociological one is introduced to examine such a claim. Software approaches to AI avoid the problem of modeling the human brain, but, because they require thorough and unambiguous instructions, they cannot model how human brains understand external reality. Hardware approaches to AI, such as parallel data-processing models, do attempt to model the brain but only in an engineering sense: in substituting procedures for meaning, they again fail to account for how human brains, let alone human minds, work. The hypothesis of human distinctiveness, consequently, is not rejected, but expanded and elaborated. The actual results of work in AI support interpretative trends in sociological theorizing rather than system-oriented ones.
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