Short Answer Questions (Unit 3)

Does the narrator of the story know whether or not he is a computer? Why or why not?

He does not know, because he says so. The switch that changes which "brain" is controlling the body is not labelled, so he doesn't know which one he is switching to or from at any given time

What is Searle's argument against strong AI?

He examines a claim that strong AI inferring information from a story means that they can literally be described as understanding the material, and secondly that whatever the machine and its programs are doing accurately explains how humans understand the story and answer the question. He disagrees with both of these, saying that he thinks those conclusions are totally unsupported from Schank's work

What is Nagel's main point?

He is trying to show that the usual analogies covering the relationship between mind and body are inadequate and only play into the reductionist's hands. He thinks we have currently no idea of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be

What is the Official Doctrine?

The official doctrine is that of the "Ghost in the Machine," meaning the distinction between mind and body. He is saying that the official doctrine is mind-body dualism, which describes the difference between existence of the mind and body, mental and physical

Does Nagel think we can be aware of facts without being able to express or understand them? Explain your answer and give an example.

Yes, we are aware of what it is like to be human, but we have no idea how to express that. Like he said, the analogies we try to use to describe it are failures at best and misleading at worst. At present, we have no idea how to express it, and yet we fully know it

What is a category error?

A category error is when a thing is assigned a characteristic that belongs to something of another category

How does the example of the bat help Nagel to make his point?

A bat has no concept of what it is like to be a bat. We could simulate it, but all that would do is show what it would be like if we were bats

Give an original example of a category mistake

Assigning a physical or spatial location to an abstract concept like love

What category mistake does the official doctrine make?

Descartes could not accept that the mental could be a variety of the mechanical/physical. Ryle does not believe that there is a distinction between mind and body-he says that we thought that minds are things, but different things than bodies, and that mental things are caused by different things than cause physical things. He says that the distinction is arbitrary, so the very existence of the two categories is a mistake. That's why in the beginning he says that he thinks the whole thing is wrong-not just pieces of it, but the whole thing fundamentally

How does the example of the Chinese room help him prove his point?

He proposes a thought experiment in which he is in a room with Chinese writing. Not understanding one word of Chinese, he also has a block of English text and a second block of Chinese writing, with the English explaining how to relate the first block to the second. Suppose also a third batch of Chinese symbols with English instructions, this time explaining the relationship between the first and second batches. The first batch is considered the "script," the second is the "story," and the third is the "program." This would enable him to answer questions with the Chinese symbols in such a way that allows his answers to become indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers-even though he understands no Chinese. In this way, he says that this shows that its not necessary for understanding to take place to initiate simulation

What point is Descartes trying to make with the example of the wax. Please give his argument.

He's talking about how malleable wax is and how this reflects our humanity and the sort of plasticity that we find ourselves with. He takes himself to be at least a mind, counting everything physical as loss, so he morphs the wax (the physical thing) in a million different ways to illustrate that the degree to which and how we change something affects its identity, and how messy it is to proclaim exactly what we are

Is the person speaking at the beginning of the story the same as the person speaking at the end? Which one is the real Dennett?

I don't think that they are the same entity. The real one is the consciousness associated with the brain in the vat. The ability of a computer to feign human consciousness is not the same as thinking.

What happens to Dennett?

In order to complete a mission for the government, his brain is removed from his body. The body is destroyed during the mission, but his disembodied brain lives on. He is given a new body his brain can control. He then learns that a computer imitation was made of his person, which can be set to control the brain