John Searle's

Chinese Room Thought Experiment

--Imagine being in a room with two slots in the wall a book and scratch paper, Chinese symbols are passed in through one slit and you write another symbol on a piece of paper that corresponds to what the book says.  Therefore, no computer can ever understand Chinese, since all it can do is the same syntactic manipulations as a man in the Chinese room.

--Against AI which defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created

Systems Reply Objection

to Searle

--argues that it is the whole system that understands Chinese, consisting of the room, the book, the man, the paper, the pencil and the filing cabinets. While Searle can only understand English, the complete system can understand Chinese. The system doesn't understand English, just as Searle doesn't understand Chinese. Searle is part of system as much as hippocampus is part of brain.  The fact that the man understands nothing is irrelevant, and is no more surprising than the fact that the hippocampus understands nothing by itself.

Analysis of Searle

including his objection

Searle’s Objection

• Man can memorize book and do the processes in his head, but still not understand Chinese.  Then only component in system is the man.

Disagree with Searle because there is a system that occurs in the man that includes parts of the brain that may indeed know Chinese.  The system cannot clearly stop at the man but must then include all aspects of the man.  Searle's rebuttal of the Systems reply objection states that man can memorize book of chinese rules and say he doesnt understand, but by remembering all rules he will understand written Chinese.

Turing Test and Motivations behind

• A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test.  Questions and answers are limited to text only to test the machine’s intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio
• Meets Sufficient condition of intelligence which is A is sufficient condition for B: If A is true than B is true.
• Motivation is to question whether or not it is possibe for machines to think

• Searle’s Chinese Room objection, 
•    Real intelligence vs. simulated intelligence: The test is also explicitly behaviorist or functionalist: it only tests how the subject acts.  A machine passing the Turing test may be able to simulate human conversational behaviour but the machine might just follow some cleverly devised rules. Even if the Turing test is a good operational definition of intelligence, it may not indicate that the machine has consciousness, or that it has intentionality. Perhaps intelligence and consciousness, for example, are such that neither one necessarily implies the other. In that case, the Turing test might fail to capture one of the key differences between intelligent machines and intelligent people.
• Eliza online program
• Ned’s Blockhead: machine has intelligence of jukebox, every clever response thought up by programmer. 

Suppose each of us has an immaterial soul. Would that solve the problem of free will? Explain

First state problem of free will

• is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions and can be held morally responsible for these actions

• The only matter settled is the fact we have a soul.
• Bring up hard determinism, libertarianism,
• incompatibilism vs. compatibilism

What is the distanct causation argument's impact on the free will debate?

The distant causation argument is for imcompatibilism and more directly for determinism.  If we are unable to control things that happened millions of years ago that directly led to us being at the point we are at now, then we have no control of us being at the point we are at right now.

Does the distant causation show that free will is an illusion?

The distant causation shows that free will is a delusion because we feel that we are at a point that is distinctly unique to us, however we had no control over us being at this point.

Hard pessimism

compatibilists feel this way

• He argued that free will is incompatible with determinism, and believed that we do act freely; this combination of views is known as libertarianism
• If an act has no cause at all (i.e., is the result of random chance), it makes no sense to hold someone morally responsible for it.
• If an act was caused by a prior event (which was in turn caused by a prior event, etc., i.e., was caused by something outside the agent’s control), we shouldn’t hold the agent responsible for it.
• So, to explain free will without adopting indeterminism, Chisholm claims that free acts are not uncaused, but are caused by “agents,” and not (solely) by previous events.

 Chisolsm is what is described as a libertarian.  Libertarians believe that an agent is the cause of all random events.

• Agent-causation: occurs when an agent “directly” causes something to happen. Then the outcome isn’t necessitated by prior events but isn’t random either

Advantages of chisolm's argument are:

• morality seems to depend on it
• we seem to experience freedom
• we can act out of character
• punishment is warranted to affect people's behavior

Disadvantages are

-Strawson said that whatever the agent-self decided, it decides as it does because of the overall way it is: and this necessary truth returns us to where we started

-show how agent could be deterministic, if responsible for randomness it oculd be responsible for all action

What is the argument from marginal cases?

1. There are some humans who dont posses x

2. So animals are on par with humans vis-a-vis x

3. So either (a) it is not morally permissible to do as we wish with animals or (b) it is morally permissible to do was we wish with humans

4. (b) is wrong

5. Therefore, it is not morally permissible to do as we wish with animals

Its proponents hold that if animals do not have direct moral status due to their lack of rationality, then neither do other members of society such infants, the senile, the comatose, and the cognitively disabled.

-argument of specieism

What is specieism?

-Speciesism involves assigning different values or rights to beings on the basis of their species membership.

-all animals have inherent rights and we cannot assign them a lesser value because of a lack of rationality. while assigning a higher value to infants and the mentlally impaired soley on the grounds of beng members of a certain species

-Singer rejects moral rights as a general matter and regards sentience as sufficient for moral status. maintains that most animals do not care about whether we kill them but care only about how we treat them when we kill them. we treat animals in a way that would be regarded as torture if humans were involved

-treatment of animals is analogous to slavery in the mid 1800's. although viewed by many as morally correct, it does not mean that it necessarily is correct.

-the abortion debate is highly controversial while a fully grown conscious chimpanzee is killed for scientific purpose with little complaint. the only reason we cna be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermidiates between humans and chimps are dead

Suppose god doesn't exist. Would it follow that there are no moral facts?

No

-Plato's arguement: many theists believe in Divine command theory which states that god is sense of morality, moral facts depend upon god's commands. plato questions that perhaps god observed these already moral acts and then reiterated them into his/her/its list of morality. previous moral facts may have existed before God created this universe

-evolutionary bioligists have observed vampire bats share some of their blood meal with bats who were unable to find food. since these animals live in close-knit grorups over many years, an individual can count on other group members to return the favor on other nights

-moral relativism. different cultures that do not believe in God will still have moral facts that they have already acted by. these culture swill be unaffected by there not being a god and their beliefs on morality will not fluctuate.

What is psychological egoism?

Psychological egoism is the view that humans are always motivated by rational self-interest, even in what seem to be selfless acts.

The argument of apparent altruism states that altruism conceals conscious self-interest. Apparent gratuitous help might be explained by the expectation or reciprocation or by the desire to gain respect or a reputation, or by the expectation of a reward in the afterlife

-propenents of psychological egoism nevertheless consider that these acts are in their essence selfish, because the real motive of these actions is that they fulfil some need of the self to the person who accomplishes them.  This "something' is genearlly refeerred to as a good feeling or avoidance of a bad feeling

-people commit psychological egoism to feel

• satisfaction of a desire to comply with a given moral code or avoidance of bad feelings from noncompliance
• feeling of power or avoidance of feeling powerless
• expectation of reciprocal beneficial action pride and self-worth or avoidance of shame