Lecture 8 Flashcards
The Turing test
Test of a machine’s ability to think like a human being or have consciousness.
Fading qualia thought experiment
What would happen if we replace neurons one by one with silicon chips
The Chinese room (John Searle)
Thought experiment where someone is in a room with a book on how to respond to Chinese characters. Conclusion is that even if that person can respond in Chinese perfectly, they don’t understand Chinese. Analogous to a computer being able to act like it can think like a human but not actually do it.
Mary the colour scientist (Frank Jackson)
Mary grows up in a black an white room and learns everything there is to know physically about colour.
When she goes outside and sees the blue sky for the first time, will she learn anything new?
What is it like to be a bat (Thomas Nagel)
Thomas concludes it is impossible to know what it is like to be another animal which means that subjective experience is outside of the domain of science.
The hard problem
Uncertain how the existence of subjective experience can or should follow from theories about physical reality.
2 ideas to do science of consciousness according to David Chalmers
- Postulate consciousness as a fundamental building block of nature itself
- Panpsychism: consciousness is universal, everything has consciousness. More information integration = more consciousness.
Cognitive closure hypothesis (Colin McGinn)
Suggests that our cognition won’t allow us to understand consciousness. Analogous to a dog trying to learn Pythagoras’ Theorem.
Determinism
The state of the world at t fully determines the state of the world at t+1. This poses a problem for free will.
Counterarguments for disproving free will
Readiness potential shouldn’t be interpreted as an unconscious preperation for the action. Instead it is a random fluctuation of activity in the motor cortex.
Overdetermination
Behaviour can be caused by many different previous experiences or mental states
