Australian philosopher Frank Jackson’s thought experiment about Mary the color scientist, often called “the Knowledge Argument,” has been pumping philosophers’ intuitions with remarkable vigor since it first appeared in 1982: Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to
Heterophenomenology is not an intuition pump, but another example of staging that is well worth putting in place before we tackle some difficult questions. Heterophenomenology is the study of first-person phenomena from the third-person point of view of objective science. The core
In 1980, John Searle he published “Minds, Brains and Programs,” his famous Chinese Room thought experiment purporting to show that “Strong AI” was impossible. He defined Strong AI as the claim that “the appropriately programmed computer literally has cognitive states and that
What is a self?? I propose that it is the same kind of thing as a center of gravity, an abstraction that is, in spite of its abstractness, tightly coupled to the physical world. You, like every other material object, have a
The woman on Mars, millions of miles from home, protected from the killing, frostless cold of the red Martian desert by fragile membranes of terrestrial technology—protected but stranded, for your spaceship has broken down beyond repair. The only hope she found was
“The Tuned Deck" is the trick: ” This deck of cards is magically tuned [Hull holds the deck to his ear and riffles the cards, listening carefully to the buzz of the cards]. By their finely tuned vibrations, I can hear and
In short, although Clapgras does not complain about any problems of color vision, and indeed passes all standard color-naming and color-discriminating tests with, well, flying colors, he has undergone a profound inversion of all his emotional and attentional reactions to colors. What
No amount of clever engineering could endow a robot with qualia—but this is an empty victory, since there is no reason to believe such intrinsic properties exist. To see this, compare the qualia of experience to the value of money. Some naïve
“Qualia” is a “technical” term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. The very same food often tastes different to me at different times.For instance, my first sip of breakfast orange
I am pretty sure that a philosophers’ zombie is conceptually incoherent, impossible, a bankrupt idea. But don’t take my word for it. What could you do to convince yourself that you can conceive of a philosophers’ zombie? Suppose you try to imagine