I digress.

Readings: "Epiphenomenal Qualia" by Frank Jackson, and "What Experience Teaches" by David Lewis Issue: Lewis's Ability Hypothesis--a counterexample? As far as I understand, the Ability Hypothesis objection that Lewis brings to Jackson is in a way adopting a Skinnerian understanding of what knowledge is--that the knowledge of the experience of red "just is the possession of these abilities to rem..

On Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" I do agree with Nagel that the subjective character of conscious experience is the crux of mental states, and that at first glance it does not easily admit of reduction to physical or causal-functional properties. However, despite the seeming intractability of such subjective character, I nonetheless think that we can be rather optimistic about wh..

Issue: Understanding defined as capability seems to justify the systems+robot reply There seem to be two distinct senses of understanding that may be relevant (and lacking for the man) in the Chinese room thought experiment--an intentional aspect that connects the syntactical elements to semantics, and the cognitive phenomenology aspect of understanding ("what it feels like to understand," if an..

Suggestion: Spatiotemporal grain of functional/causal realization? I do think that Block presents a strong intuitive (="prima facie") reason not to accept functionalist accounts of mental states. As is defined, it seems that functionalism, or machine-state functionalism, cannot adequately provide reasons for rejecting that the homunculi-headed brain or the system of Chinese nationals have mental..

Readings: Excerpts from Living Matter, by Claire Atherton, and In the Blink of an Eye, by Walter Murch As someone whose default mode of life is to intellectualize everything that goes on around me, I have always secretly admired those unlike me, those who seemed to be “living in the moment,” so to say. I’d always felt somehow locked up in the small space inside my skull, at all times applying a ..

Readings: Excerpts from the The Filmmaker’s Eye, by Gustavo Mercado. I have long wondered which of the two was the case: is it that the spectacles of modern cinema influence and form the way I apprehend the world, or is it actually the other way around, and cinema is always just trying to “catch up” to the way we already perceive reality? I encountered this puzzle one day when I realized that my..

For this assignment, I'd like you to explain in 1-2 pages ( between 300 and 500 words) where Huxley diverges from Descartes, whether in his reasoning, his assumptions, or his evidence. For Descartes, his main corpus of evidence are the results of introspection and meditation, and his main mode of reasoning can be characterized as being deductive and principle based. On the contrary, Thomas Huxle..

For this reading, you might think about the methodological perspective with its focus on behavior that is displayed (in different ways) by both Turing and Skinner. What are its virtues and weaknesses? What, if anything, do such behaviorist commitments leave out? Or, to ask the question from the other side, why should we care about anything beyond what is capable of generating behavioral conseque..

Most criticisms of the imitation game focus on the insufficiency of the game as a criterion of thinking; in other words, they say that there is more to thinking than just being able to pass the imitation game and satisfy Turing's operational definitions. But I thought of the following case which points out the limitation of the imitation game from another perspective, namely that the imitation m..