Tags / 5 quotes from 4 sources
#thought-experiment
Edge.org
The chinese room experiment is flawed
For an example of the difficulties involved, consider John Searle's celebrated Chinese Room thought experiment, which purports to show— contrary to Alan Turing's claims—that input-output characteristics alone are insufficient to determine the existence of a conscious mind…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Searle's Chinese gym
Predictably, the resilient Searle stands firm and replies with the Chinese Gym. Instead of a room containing a lone Searle, he imagines a gym full of non-Chinese speakers, one for each neuron in the neural network.
Philosophy Engines: Technology And Reading/writing/thinking Philosophy
Epistemic practices in philosophy
In this paper, I wish to consider how some of these technologies are affecting the teaching and learning of philosophy, as integral aspects of what it is to do philosophy, that is, its epistemic practices. By this I mean the means for the achievement of key epistemic goals of…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Dementia as a real-life thought experiment
Kathleen Wilkes complained that the philosophy of personal identity depends far too much on fanciful thought experiments, and that this is entirely unnecessary, because real life provides all the test cases we need.1 Dementia is perhaps the cruellest and most revealing example…
The ship of Theseus
The problem is that this logically strict notion of sameness only works for reasonably solid, stable objects. In all sorts of real-world cases, notions of ‘sameness’ are vaguer and more context-dependent. Take Hobbes’s famous example of the ship of Theseus.21 This vessel is…