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i'm recording some videos as some supplements to the
in class discussion um that we're having at LaGuardia Community College where I teach
this class
and that part of the City University of New York
so these videos are meant to supplement
that discussion that we have in class um
and they serve the purpose of allowing me to sort of reframe the stuff that
we've said
and kind of highlight the important -or what I think are the important
uh components of the discussions and the plan is roughly to have
one for every week of the class so LaGuardia is a bit unusual we have a 12-week
semester
so the plan is roughly to have 12 of these um
introductory videos so I want to say a little bit about the course content is uh
this is a philosophy of mind class
and ah if you're watching a video like this to or you'e taking a class like this then you must
have some interest in philosophy and I don't
um want to spend too much time on that I have another
uh place where I address this issue in a bit more detail
but roughly I think like to think that there are many different ways
of approaching the question 'what is philosophy?' I have one particular
approach to that question um
which I find useful and which will sort of guide the way that I present the
material it doesn't mean that you have to agree with me or accept it
um and I don't want to make a claim about it being the only way to think about philosophy
but I think it's a way that doesn't make sense in a nutshell if you look back in
history what you see is that what we call
philosophy begins um when human beings
attempt to understand the world that we live in
on their own so where's what I call a pre-philosophical way of thinking was
concerned with um...um...
ah... appealing to the gods
and divine revelation, uh, philosophy
begins with human beings trying to look around and reverse engineer the world
that we live in and the idea that guides this is that the world is somehow
orderly that it's natural and that human beings are equipped with certain tools which would
allow them to
discern the essential nature of this natural world natural orderly world
around us um and so we systematically begin to investigate the
nature of
of reality and our relation to it
that's the beginning of philosophy it's also the beginning of science
and around this time when this began which is about about six hundred years before
year 1 or so
um around this time when this begins there's no real distinction between philosophy
and science
that distinction comes much later uh and
that's the way that I tend to approach these issues so rather than see
philosophy on one side and science on the other side
I tend to see ah more of a continuum and this is a view that is closely related to
um uh a philosopher who recently died in the eighties
Quine W. V. O. Quine so if you know anything about his view of philosophy
as continuous with the
sciences then I find that a very congenial approach to things
so what does that mean? well what that means for instance is that what we'll be doing in this
class -philosophy- is a kind of science a very abstract science at times
um dealing with interpretation of data dealing with conceptual
relations perhaps
um but a very abstract science now of course there are more concrete sciences sciences
that deal with experimental
results and acquiring those results um
and we'll be appealing to some of those results as well so that
um I think that there's a nice continuum here
and rather than say we'll just be doing conceptual stuff or we'll just be doing
empirical stuff but the two should meet
I'm going to suggest that a fruitful way forward is to look at the way the two interact
and that is kind of justified by the
uh claim that uh philosophy simply consists in
the systematic study of reality and our nature
uh excuse me, reality and our relation to it and of course
this would be then the philosophy of mind would be that
enterprise turned towards the mind itself now I also happen to think that philosophy is
distinguished by a certain kind of
method a certain approach to answering these questions that relies heavily on
argument
as a source of evidence um and and so we'll look at some of
this stuff as we move through the course material
for right now I just want to say that I'm not going to be making any hard-and-fast distinctions
between
philosophy on the one hand and science on the other we're simply going to take
philosophy of mind
as the systematic study of the mind um sometimes being very abstract and
conceptual
and sometimes being very concrete and empirical
so the first thing we want to do then is discuss
a little bit about what the nature of the thing we're studying is so what is the
mind?
what is it to be mental ?
well, we can start with some common sense inventory of the kinds of things that we call mental
things like beliefs things like perception that seems like a mental
activity attention
wondering, doubt...various sensations
if you look at this stuff you might think wow, well it seems like there's one or two
properties which look interesting and which seem like they might characterize
all these things that we call mental so on the one hand
we have a property called intentionality and intentionality is what we're gonna
spend
the second week of class on so
intentionality very simply put is a property that
thoughts have of being directed towards or about objects
so for instance right now I'm thinking about the Empire State Building
I'm thinking that it is no longer the tallest building
in New York City so there's a thought and
it's natural to say that my thought has a target
its not as though the thought isn't about anything
if someone were to say to me 'what are you thinking about right now?' I'd say I'm
thinking about the Empire State Building and the Empire State Building is a real
object it's an existing
physical structure in New York City so
my thought seems directed towards or somehow
relevantly related to
the actual building here in New York City and what's interesting about
this is it does for instance look like a relation
between me and the building thinking about the building
and that relation doesn't seem to really depend on how far away I am from the
building I can think about it California I can think about it in
orbit around the Earth and in each case -and i can think about it here where I am recording
this video in Brooklyn-
and in each case my thought is
aimed at or picks out the very same physical object
intentionality we think
about thing now that's a very interesting
property the property of intentionality and it seems to characterize
a great many mental attitudes for instance
I can think about thinks things I can wonder about things
I can desire that something be the case
I can intended that I do something
such-and-such and such and such I can be afraid
that something is going to occur so all these things look like they're directed
or aimed towards something something if I'm afraid that
that there will be a terrorist attack
then the the
the occurrence of an attack is what my fear is directed towards it's
intentionally directed towards that now some people have gone so far as to
say that this property
being intentionally directed towards an object
is the thing which is distinctively
had by all and only mental
things or to put that in a bit better English
that intentionality is the Mark of the Mental or the thing which we know
makes a mental object
mental what is it about it that makes it mental? the answer here would be:
intentionality now of course some people deny that intentionality is the Mark of
the mental
um uh I it seems to do a very good job for characterizing thoughts
and desires and beliefs and wonderings and so forth
but many people have thought that there are um um
mental items which do not have any sort of intentionality
and predominant on that list
are perceptions and sensations bodily sensations in particular
pain for instance um hunger maybe
so what
red when you see red or hear a sound
um one thing that you might think is that
that is not directed at something
in the same way as my thought that that thing is red is directed at the red object there
now the philosophy of perception is what we're going to be spending
the second week on um so we were just talking about the question of whether
perceptions and sensations have intentional
aboutness or whether they're directed at something
ahem! now one thing we will talk about is that many people have
suggested that they do even though they don't seem like it like for instance
maybe a pain um which occurs in the knuckle
and you might say is located there perhaps that is merely located in the
brain
and it represents the pain as being located here or in other words that
the pain is sort of
intentionally directed at a certain part of the body even if it is not really located
there now that's an interesting complex idea
called 'intentionalism' about the sensory properties and we're gonna get to that
later in ah
in the third week which is when we're going to be dealing with questions about
the philosophy of perception
so that's the other thing that
um uh unites the question we're asking is intentionality the mark of the mental?
some people say it characterizes thoughts and it can also characterizes
um sensory um ah phenomenon like pains and red and so forth although that's a
hotly debated question and then the other question there
uh for us
is well what is it that distinguishes something like a sensation of red or
perception of red
from thinking about red um so I'm having a thought about red
and i'm having a perception of red like I'm seeing red
versus thinking about red well what's the difference? well
one clear and obvious difference I hope is that when you're seeing red it looks
a certain way it looks like red
um now we call that says sometimes people call that the sensory quality
and sometimes people use the technical term 'qualia'
or 'quale' in the singular um sometimes people talk about the
phenomenal property
um whatever it is what we're talking about is the redness
of the thing which you're experiencing
so your thought about red like
when you think 'red is a color'
now you may picture red and then that would be a mental image
which is closely more closely related to a perception or a sensation although there's a
question about
what exactly the relation is between a picturing or imaging
um where we mean imaging like having an actual image in one's mind
and perceiving or sensing and we'll look at that
but many people think that this property
um the qualia or whatever it is the redness of the red
the sound of the bell the feel
of a smooth surface those things
are not intentional or
if to put it a bit more modestly if they do
involve some kind of intentionality that that's not all that there is to them
that there is in addition also a phenomenal property a qualitative property
some kind of aspect of the experience
which distinguishes the red experience from the green experience
um that would be ah the what it's like to have those properties perhaps or
or maybe ah you know something to do with the way it functions and one's
behavioral outputs and inputs those have been the various candidates
now those... some people will take the opposite route and claim what
what the mark of the mental is
is that every mental things has phenomenality
or phenomenology or there something that it's like for the
creature who has it um now of course
some people will deny that every mental state has some kind of qualitative
property or phenomenal feel um
and of course thoughts have been
one candidate here when you think that thought that two plus two equals four it
doesn't immediately strike one that it's the same kind of thing like seeing red
uh
and so maybe
we just have these two categories intentionality on the one hand
and sensory quality qualitative character phenomenal feel or something
like that on the other hand
and uh maybe we can say that
to be mental is to have one or the other of these two properties so
you find people in all three camps um people say intentionality
characterizes every mental state
people who say phenomenal feel qualitative character
characterizes every mental state and people who say no
it's rather a hodgepodge mix of intentional stuff
and um phenomenal stuff
so that's gonna be the set of questions which
occupies us for the first two weeks we're going to look at intentionality
and mental content um what does it mean for
a thought to be about something do you have to be related to the world in a certain
way
um is there a language of thought does it have to be
computational or is there connections does it have to be more neural or brain like
so there are a lot different questions
that we'll be addressing in that section and then in the next week after that
third week we'll move to the philosophy of perception
and we'll be dealing with these questions about what it
means to see red or hear a sound
now one of the central questions in the philosophy of perception is whether the
perception involves
a direct awareness of the external world um a direct awareness of mind
independent
objects which exist even when we're not perceiving them
or whether perception involves a kind of um
uh awareness of a mental object
and then that mental object either stands for or represents or somehow
ah is in between us and the actual
physical object in the world external to us
so on the one hand we have people known as
Naive Realist or Direct Realists and they believe that perception is a
kind of
um openness to the world like that the eyes are like a window
and you're just like looking through the window and you're not
the window doesn't get in the way you just see through it to the thing that's outside
the thing that's outside
is the way that it is um so that the table that I'm looking at
is the way that it is even when I'm not looking at it
now on the other hand there are people who think um ah well
you see there's something mental that gets in between you and the table that mental thing is called
a representation maybe
ah it's call an idea, an experience something like that
which is the thing that you're aware of and then you're only
if you're lucky at best you're only indirectly aware of the physical object
external to you um and and the thing that really pushes and pulls
here are two sort of common sense
thoughts about perception so on the one hand when you perceive something it seems
like you're directly related to its like I said, it's like a window you're right there
it's like a direct line between you and it
but on the other hand there are States
which seems hard to reconcile with that directness
ah illusions for instance
um hallucinations dreaming there there are cases when
um it seems you have to appeal to something
intermediary between the object
and you for instance just
really quickly if you put a straight stick in water and it appears bent
and then you say 'okay well that's an Illusion'
but it still is the case that you experience something which appears to
have the property of being
bent and you might wonder what is that thing
the actual physical stick is not bent
so which thing has the property
of being bent? well some people have responded ah the mental image the mental
thing that your aware of that's the property that's has the property of being bent
the physical object which its standing for in between
doesn't have that properly so that would be an indirect view
um about perception in this area so that's what we're gonna be
turning to in the third
week and the philosophy of perception
and after that we'll be moving to more traditional question so having
sort of looked at the two accounts so looking at thought on the one hand and looking at perception
on the other hand intentionality characterizing thought
qualitative character phenomenal feel characterizing perception
trying to figure out what the relation between them is and how they track
or relate to the external world after we sort of think about the mind
in general we'll turn to
the question of where that fits into reality
um and we'll start addressing the more traditional questions
where people start here where Descartes started like is the mind physical
um at that point we'll address the arguments which have been given that the mind is not
a part of physical
reality and that it could not be a part of physical reality
so we'll look at dualism and also some other
non-physical alternatives some other strange views
um so in week 4 we'll do traditional dualism and look at some issues about mental causation
how do these two things relate if the mind is not the body
um the problem of other minds how do we know about ah
other people's minds given the difference we'll look at those issues
um in the fifth week we'll look at some of the reactions
idealism solipsism panpsychism that's going to be very interesting
um especially we'll look at epiphenomenalism
um and we'll read some Huxley which I think is a wonderfully brilliant piece
um looking making a case for epiphenomenalism
ah even though that's very counterintuitive epiphenomenalism is the
view
that the mind um consists in properties which are caused by the brain
but which in fact have no causal effect in turn on the brain
so that the mind is inert its there and real but not causally
active it's a very interesting view not very commonsensical obviously
but there's some arguments for it so after that we're going to look at some
um ah I'm sorry one of the more interesting arguments for epiphenomenalism comes from looking actual
physiology and the anatomy of reflex
loops and so forth and so on which is what Huxley actually does
it's actually pretty interesting to see how much of behavior can be automated
and doesn't really require the input conscious experience
whether that's all of it or not I don't know that's a hard question but
its surprising how good a job and how far you can get
without having any of that stuff do anything
now of course one thing that hasn't come up
in the discussion yet is the relation of the mind to the brain so what
what role is the brain playing here at all well if dualism is true
ah the brain is not playing much of a role at all maybe like a broadcasting roll or
it's not exactly clear what role the brain could be playing
um if dualism is true but we'll look at that then though
we'll look at the more contemporary views which try to take the brain
more seriously
the first of which is the identity theory which claims that
certain aspects of the mind simply are the brain
and then we can debate about which aspects what about is it mood?
is it thoughts is it emotions is it sensations is it perceptions is all of them?
there are various moves I can be made here
ah and if ah after examining
the dispute over whether the mind is identical to the brain
we'll look at the more current rise of what's known as functionalism
in psychology sometimes its called information processing theory the basic idea there
to put it
way too simply at the beginning but in a way that
ah we'll flesh out later the basic idea is that
brain is a naturally evolved computer
made out of neurons and that the mind what we call the mind and consciousness is
simply software
which runs on that computer so that's functionalism
now how is it different than the identity theory? Well very basically
um the functionalists believe that there can be
other kinds of computers which run the same software just like
a Mac and a PC can run Windows
so too a human brain and you know an alien brain that doesn't have any
kind of neurons at all
and also maybe even a computer brain um made out of silicon can all run the same
software that we call mind and consciousness
okay so once we look at all that stuff
then we'll in a week 8 going to
come to the question of consciousness so all that is just sort of mind in general thinking
and we're going to
not make a big distinction between thought thinking and feeling
although we'll make the appropriate distinctions along the way
and then we're going to look specifically at the problem of consciousness
is it different than mind what's the relation between consciousness and mind?
we're going to look at the claims have been made that whatever we do about
other mental things like thinking and so forth
that consciousness resists any kind of scientific explanation
we're going to look at modal arguments against it
the claim that's it's impossible
or that we can know a priori
that it cannot be the case
that consciousness is a physical product
and finally we look at some specific issues
um can computers think do they have consciousness?
can we know that we don't live in a simulation are we simulated?
are we computer simulations?
is there the possibility of giving a specific physical account of
consciousness we'll look at some of the
attempts higher-order theories versus first-order theories
and then finally we'll look at one of the more challenging views known as eliminative materialism
materialism which is in the claim
claim that consciousness doesn't exist
at least not in a way that we think that it does and that's a very challenging
view that the mind as as it appears from inside
isn't something which exists
at least not as we commonsensicaly conceive of it
okay so having now gone over the course syllabus and giving you an idea of the kinds of
things were going to be talking about um
in the rest the semester
I want to use the rest of our introductory time here
to talk about how we might answer
those questions so we want to know what intentionality is how are we gonna figure
that out?
we want to know whether the mind is physical or not what kind of evidence are we going to use?
now I gave you some idea already that I see this continuum between
on the one hand the empirical sciences in the in the laboratory
and on the other hand the theoretical sciences
um in the armchair and I think that
the same person can occupy both of those roles
at different times in their career
or even during course of the same day
so the evidence we have ah before us can come from the natural sciences it can come from
pure philosophical reflection but what are the sources
of evidence in either of those categories that are going to be relevant to the
questions we'll be talking about?
um well first of all we can start with something really close to us
we'll start with the notion of introspection
well, there is obviously at least on occasion
times where we know what we're thinking
or know what we're feeling so when you're in pain you know that you're in pain
you believe that you're in pain when you're thinking something if someone says to
you 'what are you thinking about?' it's
not very difficult to provide an answer it's not as though you have to stop for
second
and say 'ah well I don't know what I was thinking about' now I'm not denying that there are times like that
or that there can be times like that what i'm saying is that in a typical case of
thinking
we are aware of the contents of our own thoughts in an immediate and kind of
nice and direct way
and whatever whatever it is that allows us to do that we call
introspection so that's an ability that we have
that's something that we start with as a data point
um a datum point if you like technical correctness
um so then the question is well what is this thing?
common sense tells us it just some kind of access to our own mind
and there are different views about how we have that kind of access some people
say well look you know it's
like perception right uh you perceive the redness of the table and then you can kind of also
inside and perceive your own perception
um inner perception views have been very popular
there are also views that ascribe it to a version of the intellect or to
a capacity for having higher-order thoughts
thinking or monitoring or some other cognitive like relationship
more like thinking to one's own mental life
whatever the true nature of introspection is it's an interesting question and we'll spend a
little bit I'm looking at it but many people have thought that
introspection was a source of evidence about the nature of the mind itself
and this is probably one of the more traditional views
in philosophy and maybe even psychology
the idea that um introspection provides us with the unique
maybe even privileged access to what goes on in our own mind
and two ideas associated with introspection are going to come up and we'll
talk about them
the idea of infallibility and incorrigibility
so to take one before the other the more familiar one probably
infallibility
you can use these words in a lot of ways and I don't wanna you know
say this is the only right way to use these words but this is the way we'll be using the words
when people are talking to me um so to say
that an introspective belief or judgment is infallible
is simply to say that you can't be wrong about it
if you um think you're in pain and you believe that then
that's impossible for that judgment or belief to be wrong
notice that this is a claim about your introspective judgments or knowledge of
your own mental state that it's
direct in such a way that does not allow
for cases of getting it wrong in the way the normal ordinary knowledge claims
to be like you may say
I know that this is the case and someone says no
you find out, or excuse me I shouldn't have said that yeah I know that this is the case
and you later find out oh you are wrong about that
so infallibility is the denial of that
classic person here is Descartes Descartes seemed to think
or at least he's often portrayed as thinking and I guess you could debate about
whether he actually
thought this but it certainly seems like he thinks that
when you introspect
you have immediate and direct access to the contents of your own mind in such a way
that if you think that this is the case
can't be wrong um and that is that also goes the other way so if you say 'i'm not in pain'
then you can't be wrong about that so not only is it that you can't be wrong
when you say 'ow that hurts!'
you can't find out that you were not actually in pain but
also if you are sincerely believing that you're not in pain
infallibility would claim well, ok then you aren't in pain because you have an
infallible access to the contents of your own mind
now another idea associated with introspection
is what is sometimes called incorrigibility and people use these words in different
ways
again I don't want to make too much of a fuss about the right way quote-unquote
to use a word
um but I will I will say that one common way in philosophy that the word incorrigibility
is used
is to pick out the idea that that there is a kind of access to your own mental
state which is unique
and which no one else has so the rough idea is that
when we make an introspective judgment like that you are in pain or that you are hungry or
that you think that whatever
that you are the greatest
authority on that that there is nobody who is in a position
to know more about what's going on in your own mind than you are
and the result is that you cannot be corrected or overruled
um so that someone cannot come along and say
actually you're mistaken about that you go 'ouch! I'm in pain' and they say no
your mistaken uh the claim is that that's impossible
now ahem! excuse me now I'm not saying that introspection does have these properties
what i'm saying is that many people have thought they had these properties
um and that maybe if there are problems with them we can give
limited defenses of them
so whether that's true or not I don't know we'll look at some empirical evidence and look at some philosophical
debates that suggest that maybe
there's some problems introspection how big and how
um many problems is something that we're going to address
but the main claim that I'm making right now is just that
introspection seems like one
kind of source of evidence in this at least at the beginning
um for knowing about the mind I mean you night think its the thing we know
the most about
right right we're closest to it in a way and there's no space
between me and my own mind or at least you might think
at the beginning of inquiry okay
so that's one source of evidence
now of course that's knowledge about my own mind but of course
much empirical science is based on
observation and observation has to be
you might think public and repeatable so that other people can observe the same
thing
and if you can't observe the contents of my mind then
you might want to focus on something else and so many people have said
to study the mind you study its outward expression you can't get at the thing itself
so you study its outward expression and one
way of doing that would be to look at behavior
and so psychologists will often use
um the behavior of animals as an indication of what kind of mental state they're in
a kind of obvious example here is if you're looking at a mouse
and you want to know if the mouse is afraid or not you can check its heart rate
um they do freezing behaviors ah were a mouse will freeze
and and that's a way of knowing that its alert to danger
so now of course we're going to notice that threes some philosophical questions here
that arise between the relationship between behavior on the one hand
and mental states on the other
there was a school of philosophy known as behaviorism um which claimed that that's all there was to the mind was
behavior ah and that the internal states
somehow don't really matter as much as people
think that they do and that's an interesting idea that we'll touch briefly
on when we look
um um at the early identity theories and so forth and so on and the precursors to
functionalism
we won't spend too much time on behaviorism
to be quite frank with you
okay
now of course one kind of behavior that we rely on a lot
is verbal behavior speaking like I'm doing right now
and clearly commonsensicaly what we would say is that we use language
to express thoughts so
in common sense we recognize a close relationship between
language on the one hand and thoughts on the other hand intentional states
so one strategy you might have is to look
at the structure of language
and try to use that to infer something
about the thing which produces it the mind
and the thing which it's used to express or which
language sometimes is thought to encode thoughts
so one source of evidence introspection
another source in evidence behavior like the way you behave
still third source of evidence maybe a sub category under behavior
um language and many people have thought that language tells us something
important about thought
so for instance will look at the debate over whether there's a language of
um closely associated with Jerry Fodor
Fodor for instance argues that there are certain properties which natural language has
which thoughts also possess and so therefore
thoughts must have something like a similar structure
to the language in which they are expressed the rough idea here being that they
must have
components like ah word sized components that can be
restructured along certain lines like that if you say
'you are happy' you can turn that into a question
by taking the 'are' and moving it 'are you happy?'
now you can also think the same thoughts I can think the thought
'you are happy' and I can think the thought 'are you happy?'
so Fodor's rough idea and we'll spend a lot of time on this later
um in the intentionality section but the rough idea here
is that well there must be a similar kind of structure
in the thought that allows for the same kind of manipulation so if in the language
um we have some kind of grammar or syntactic change where
you can take 'are' move it and then produce a new thing
so that thought must have a similar kind of structure
and um that's a very popular way of thinking
about the mind is by looking at language as a kind of
view or clue to what's going on
inside the mind um okay so
that's third source of evidence now finally another source of evidence that you would
categorize under the behavior general category
and which is much modern and contemporary is looking at the brain
so um now when we
in this day and age think the brain is responsible for the behavior
both verbal and also bodily
and so it would be nice to be able to see what the brain itself is doing and for
a long time that was not possible but now we have some
visually visualizing technology MRI being the primary
ones um and EEG for instance
um so this gives us the ability to look at what the brain is doing
what kind of behavior it exhibits while people are doing specific tasks and
this is
the more recent development of functional MRI fMRI
and also what are called Event Related Potentials which is EEG
um uh which is recordings from the scalp ah of brain
activity which are taken and coded to
to an event which is being done like for instance a task a sorting task or a button
button press
task just to give an example so
roughly the idea is that one possible source of evidence about what the mind is up
to
is by looking at what the brain is doing and we can look at what the brain is doing
using the techniques from neuroscience and cognitive psychology and cognitive
neuroscience
and cognitive psychology sorry cognitive neuropsychology was what I meant to say
okay so behavior will give us a lot of evidence
but of course i't doesn't address the philosophical question
of is behavior all that there is
and of course this brings us to what one might consider the very last
source of evidence which is um a priori reasoning or
reasoning about cases
and what would be the case or what
could have been the case these are two different conceptions which we'll
tease apart later in the semester but one idea is
that ah the world is a certain and we want to study the way that it is
but here's another question
but there's another question which is
does it have to be that way or could it have been
a different way?
and a even slightly different question related to that question which is
given the way that it is and given the way
it could have been what ways could
be made into worlds? even if they don't happen to be
our world now those kinds of questions
can't be answered um by
empirical science because if you want to know how the world could have been
different given the way that it is well
we can't go back and look so we have got to have some other kind of evidence and many
people have thought that one kind of evidence about
possibility what's possible what's impossible
is what's conceivable or what's
imaginable um and this again isn't supposed to tell us
or maybe it is it says a excuse me what I'm supposed to say
in the first instance what this is supposed to tell us about is
ways the world could be or ways the world
could have been um and then in
other instances some people claim if
you're careful this can also tell us about the way the world
actually is
so a priori reasoning plays an important role
and if you wanna know
whether the brain is the mind for instance one important question is could it be
something else that's a question that functionalists ask could a computer
be conscious well we don't have a conscious computer so that's a question about what's
possible
or what's impossible and in this
area thought experiments are gonna play
a crucial role and one thing we'll do is we'll examine various thought experiments what would
happen if this were the case? what would happen if that had been the case
could that have been the case? and then we might wonder well
is this a reliable method? and one of the problems here one of the questions that
we'll address
is whether or not anyone of these methods that we've laid out these
these basic methods um introspection looking at behavior
and a priori reasoning whether these methods
ah can help us shed light on the questions were interested and maybe on
each other
for instance can, what is the relation between the empirical
sciences and the data that they produce and the a priori sciences and the data they produce?
logic for instance and mathematics and reasoning
based on those kinds of things