Let us suppose we are going to insert into Tom’s brain the following false belief: I have an older brother living in Cleveland. Let us suppose the cognitive micro-neurosurgeon can do the requisite rewiring, as much and as delicate as you please.
What do all death threats have in common? Only their meaning, it seems. And meaning is not like radioactivity or acidity, a property readily discriminated by a well-tuned detector. The closest we have come yet to creating a generalpurpose meaning-detector is IBM’s
The film The Boys from Brazil, about Nazi scientists who raise Hitler clones (thanks to some salvaged DNA) inspired this thought experiment: Let us suppose, then, that a group of scientists has managed to create an individual—call him Mr Puppet—who, by design,
I [Daniel Dennett] think it is just as obvious that people can gradually become morally responsible during their passage from infancy to adulthood as it is that lineages of reptiles and then therapsids can gradually become a lineage of mammals over the
"Sphexishness is an important property not so much because so many whole, simple animals— insects, worms, fish—exhibit it (though they do, in varying degrees), but because it gives us a term for the limited, robotic, myopic, competences out of which we can
Suppose you install two different chess-playing programs on your computer and yoke them together with a little supervisory program that pits them against each other, game after game, in a potentially endless series. Will they play the same game, over and over,
An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today. My
Probably every one of you knows the game of rock, paper, and scissors. Can some people play the game better than others? Yes, Perhaps by picking up subtle hints from the faces and postures of their opponents. People are notoriously bad at
If the world is determined, then we have pseudo-random number generators in us, not truly (quantum-mechanical) random randomizers. If our world is determined, all our lottery tickets were drawn at once, in effect, about fourteen billion years ago at the moment of
The breathtakingly simple model of a deterministic world created by the mathematician John Horton Conway and his graduate students in 1970. Using the Game calls Life, Conway conculded that "by the time you have built up enough pieces into something that can