Some questions to consider.

Professor Brian Butler

December, 2003

 

These questions cover the final sections of the course in which we are dealing with criticisms or objections to the CRUM hypothesis.  You should be familiar with chapter nine and, to a much lesser extent, with chapters ten, eleven and twelve.

 

1. Antonio Damasio, an internationally renown neuroscientist claims that Descartes’s error ( the title of a book by Damasio) is that Descartes did not appreciate the value of emotions for consciousness and thinking.  How would we incorporate similar information for an intelligent machine?

 

2. Consider the problem of emotions in chapter nine.  Is it a problem concerning emotion as information about a mental state or is it a problem of emotion as motivation that focuses on a particular goal?

 

3. You go to party and meet this really attractive person who is heavily into the arts.  When you mention you’re studying cognitive science they immediately point out that no computer could ever write poetry or paint a picture.  How would you respond?  Why?

 

4. In chapter eleven, Sir Roger Penrose makes it clear that he does not believe that a computer could ever discover anything new in mathematics.  Would you agree? Why?

 

5. In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett claims that John Searle seriously misguides us with his analogy of the Chinese Room by ignoring the fact that the program that speaks Chinese must be an “extraordinarily supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with ‘world-knowledge’ and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, its own ‘motivations’ and the motivations of its interlocutor, and much, much more.” (Dennett, 1991, page 438).  Evaluate the strength of Searle’s argument from this perspective.

 

6. Patricia and Paul Churchland are two philosophers who accept the idea that we are really “neural networks” and nothing more.  How does this perspective help refute the question Searle asks about “what understands Chinese?” in the Chinese Room?

 

7. What is a qualia?  Could a computer that passes the Turing Test ever experience a qualia?  What does David Chalmers think?

 

8. Chalmers claims that your skull may not represent the limit of your mind and argues for a concept he calls the ‘extended mind’.  What does this mean?