Philosophers’ zombies, in contrast, can be delightful company, the life of the party, as loving and joyous and spontaneous as anybody you know. Some of your best friends might be zombies. Philosophers’ zombies are (by definition) behaviorally indistinguishable from normal conscious human
Our minds don’t have a single magnificent summit, consciousness. Contrary to a tradition going back at least to Descartes in the seventeenth century, conscious phenomena are neither the most “central” nor the “highest” phenomena in our minds (Jackendoff, 1987; Dennett, 1991a). A
You didn’t have to have a semantic or intentional interpretation of the boxes to see it: a caused red, and b caused green—an obvious pattern in need of explanation. In each instance of button-pressing, the scientists understood exactly how each step in
Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different molecules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, The Swampman, moves
Brains are energetically very expensive organs, and if they can’t do the important job of destinguish the words meaning, they aren’t earning their keep. Brains, in other words, are supposed to be semantic engines. What brains are made of is kazillions of
Note even though all the robot’s intentional states and acts are derived from your purposes, they are beginning to become detached somewhat from your purposes. Since you designed the robot to “think for itself” to some degree, its “thinking” may escape your
Ruth Millikan (for instance) is right that given the nature of design constraints, it is unlikely in the extreme that there could be different ways of skinning the cat that left two radically different, globally indeterminate, tied-for-first-place interpretations. Indeterminacy of radical translation
Suppose Pat says that Mike “has a thing about redheads.” What Pat means, roughly, is that Mike has a stereotype of a redhead that is rather derogatory and influences Mike’s expectations about, and interactions with, redheads. It could turn out that Mike
Back in the days, there were elevator operators, people whose job was to go up and down in an elevator all day, stopping at the right floors to take on and let off passengers. Now imagine what happened when it became possible
A virtual machine is what you get when you impose a particular pattern of instructions (more literally, dispositions) on a real machine that has lots of plasticity—interacting parts that can be in many different states. Since a virtual machine does informational work,