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The famous version of this is Twin Earth thought experiment, which explores two worlds which are identical, except one has no H2O. The H2O in this world is instead replaced with a substance XYZ. Denizens of both worlds call their substance "water." This thought experiment has countless arguments made on both sides.
Your particular argument presupposes ...
16
tl;dr- Depends on a person's level of mental development. The truth's crazy complicated, but we go through stages of understanding.
Stage 1: Realism.
The simplest way to understand reality is through the lens of realism. It's the mental model children adopt upon acquiring object permanence.
The gist is that there's one, objective reality that we all ...
14
This illustrates how removed the concept of 'philosophical zombie' is from reality. The mirror image does not have a brain; it is a trick of light. It is no more a 'zombie' than a photo, a drawing, or a terse sentence in a bad novel.
More specifically; the concept of a philosophical zombie is that there can exist something in principle indistinguishable ...
13
These are all terms that one frequently reads in texts on Cognitive Science. I will try to find some exemplary definitions:
Consciousness: Many philosophers have argued that consciousness is a unitary concept that is understood intuitively by the majority of people in spite of the difficulty in defining it. Others, though, have argued that the level of ...
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It certainly seems plausible to claim that we occasionally behave like p-zombies.
However, philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore have taken the claim one step further, arguing that everybody is always a p-zombie. How exactly do they pull this off? Well, they simply deny that consciousness exists at all! They say that what we think is ...
12
In short, no. At least not under any falsifiable definition of an organism. When biologists refer to a superorganism or an extended phenotype, they aren't referring to a form of life, but the capacity of a species to propagate themselves.
Human systems fail the sniff test for life as well. Societies and organizations cannot replicate themselves by way of ...
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It's not entirely clear to me where you're having difficulty but I will attempt to go over the thought experiment and provide some clarity.
Note that this experiment depends on monism (e.g. physicalism) unless the teletransporter can copy "non-substance" as well.
So the assumption is that everything that makes you you is based on the physical location of ...
11
I feel like I'm missing something in the question. I think you're asking: "Is it possible for a sentence to be true, even if nobody believes it?" If that's not right, let me know and I'll try again.
There are a variety of theories of truth, and they would offer different answers to the question you've posed. Let me mention just three such views:
The ...
10
My friend, you stopped where things get really interesting.
The result of the process you described is a human consciousness whose substratum is a computer program instead of a bodily organ. Much more importantly, you did the transformation in a way that preserved what I call the continuity of consciousness.
Let's assume that this computer program is ...
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Within those who stipulate there is a God, I've seen 2 major approaches to this question:
1) Logic is subservient to God. If God, or one of his representatives says something or behaves a certain way, then it becomes de facto logical, even if it does not follow from normal rules of logic. (My opinion, for what it's worth, is this often leads to "logic" ...
9
I will answer this question with Kant's own words taken from (my personal favorite of his works) The Critique of the Power of Judgment. Specifically, I will be citing the Cambridge University Press 2nd Edition, edited by Paul Guyer and translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Please decide for yourself what you think Kant would think of Darwinian ...
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James was not the first one to realize that central "I" or "consciousness" as an entity is not in any way helpful in explaining the will, or any other mental faculties. It is just a homunculus in the head that moves all the problems along, with no explanatory power, and potential for infinite regress: what is the central "I" of the central "I"? The only ...
8
Approach 1 - (4) is false.
One line of reasoning has already been presented.
(4). The person in the mirror looks and behaves like a conscious, qualia possessing human: you.
This is false, because the person in the mirror simply reflects the behavior of something else, which is not the behavior of a conscious human, but that of a reflection.
Approach 2 -...
8
Will computers ever have consciousness?
Depends on who you ask. 3 possible responses:
Consciousness and the mind are non physical phenomena, and computers are physical systems so, no, computers can't be conscious since they lack the non-physical component. The idea that consciousness is non-physical is called (mind-body) Dualism.
Consciousness is a ...
8
Mind continuous with environment
There is a considerable body of literature on 'the extended mind'. David Chalmers and Andy Clark are major names here. The basic idea is that 'the mind "extends" into the environment in cases in which a human organism and the environment become cognitively coupled systems' (Erik Myin, 'Unbounding the Mind', ' The Extended ...
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There is an enormous philosophical literature on the question of identity, and the canonical thought experiment is the Ship of Theseus.
Suffice it to say that you'll find a wide range of opinions on this matter over the past couple millenia of philosophical thought, but you'll find very few people willing to argue that you are exactly the same as you were a ...
7
Various branches of cognitive science (psychophysics especially, but not only) have demonstrated that we can be profoundly misled in our subjective interpretation of an experience. One of the most profound: when you look around, it seems as though you're seeing things the whole time. You're not. The visual stream is effectively blanked during a saccade ...
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Arthur Eddington's "The Nature of the Physical World" as reprinted and edited in "Quantum Physics and Ultimate Reality; Mystical Writings of Great Physicists" editor Michael Green
and
"What is Life?: with 'Mind and Matter'" by Erwin Schroedinger
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If we apply Russell’s theory of (definite) descriptions (“On Denoting” 1905) to the sentence “God is subject to logic”, it can be analysed into a conjunction of the following three:
there is an x such that x is the creator of the universe: ∃x[CU(x)]
for any x and y, if x is the creator of the universe and y is the creator of the universe, then x=y (i.e. ...
7
Under a strict, philosophical, reading of the quote, Dr. Tyson isn't making much sense; interpreting "science" as "the methodology of science" or "the social endeavor of science" this sentence is a non-sequitur. Even if you are inclined to cut him some slack and interpret science more along the lines of "the findings that science produces", then Dr. Tyson ...
7
"19th century philosophers are not necessary to understand contemporary debates" is largely true because modern debates regurgitate ideas and arguments explored at length since Kant. Here is an example of Searle arguably replaying an argument already discussed by Kant, see What are the problems with the argument for the mind-body dualism from immateriality ...
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Question: “Can science account for consciousness?”
I don’t think everyone currently agrees on the answer, but personally, I believe it can. The future will tell.
Question: “I'm just interested what the scientific explanation is if there is one?”
You’re asking for the scientific explanation; I think I can give some. The followings are current scientific ...
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But minds also think, and this is a private activity
What's more, Wittgenstein makes this argument explicitly with his "Beetle Box" thought experiment (in the Philosophical Investigations.) And, what's more, he also shows that much thought is not of a propositional nature, and does not work well with traditional notions of epistemology; one cannot be ...
6
Richard Feynman summarized modern science with this statement:
In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we
guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what
would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare
the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or
experience, compare ...
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There are two things written by Kant that pretty much answer your question:
First, the famous quote “Two things inspire me to awe: the starry heavens above and the moral universe within” seems to indicate that Kant would put the beauty of the Universe on par with the beauty of the "unity of human consciousness".
Second, Kant was the first philosopher who ...
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What you're talking about is called "cognitive phenomenology," i.e. what it is like to experience a certain kind of cognitive state like knowing, or believing, or understanding, or doubting. Some people don't think there is such a thing, others do. I don't know this literature very well, but there is a recent (2012) collection of papers on the topic that ...
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Its the Turing Test put into first-person narrative form of a philosophical zombie (a golem would do just as well, and perhaps better, as it figured in the pre-history of imaginative literature and thinking about robotics). It was Chalmers that popularised this to argue that Physicalism is false - ie Consciousness is not Physical, as the SEP describes.
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I would suggest that the question might be better posed to anthropologists than philosophers. The relevant term that you're looking for is "behavioral modernity". My impression is that the major controversy about the advent of behavioral modernity is whether it was gradual accumulation of small changes or a great leap forward, but I'm not an expert on the ...
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