The Chinese room argument holds that a computer executing a program cannot have a mind, understanding, or consciousness, regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was presented in a 1980 paper by the philosopher John Searle entitled "Minds, Brains, and Programs" and published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Before Searle, similar arguments had been presented by figures including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1714), Anatoly Dneprov (1961), Lawrence Davis (1974) and Ned Block (1978). Searle's version has been widely discussed in the years since. The centerpiece of Searle's argument is a thought experiment known as the Chinese room.
In philosophy and mathematics, Newcomb's paradox, also known as Newcomb's problem, is a thought experiment involving a game between two players, one of whom is able to predict the future.
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, computer scientist, and figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He contributed to the studies of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.
Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.
Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment that appears to disprove the second law of thermodynamics. It was proposed by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. In his first letter, Maxwell referred to the entity as a "finite being" or a "being who can play a game of skill with the molecules". Lord Kelvin would later call it a "demon".
In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem.
In the philosophy of mind, functionalism is the thesis that each and every mental state is constituted solely by its functional role, which means its causal relation to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs. Functionalism developed largely as an alternative to the identity theory of mind and behaviorism.
In philosophy, the brain in a vat (BIV) is a scenario used in a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of human conceptions of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, consciousness, and meaning. Gilbert Harman originated the scenario, which Hilary Putnam turned into a modernized version of René Descartes's evil demon thought experiment. Following many science fiction stories, the scenario involves a mad scientist who might remove a person's brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer that would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those a brain normally receives. According to such stories, the computer would then be simulating reality and the "disembodied" brain would continue to have perfectly normal conscious experiences, like those of a person with an embodied brain, without these being related to objects or events in the real world. According to Putnam, the thought of "being a brain-in-a-vat" (BIV) is either false or meaningless. Considered a cornerstone of Semantic externalism, the argument produced significant literature. The Matrix franchise and other fictional works (below) are considered inspired by Putnam's argument.
Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated, often called simply the Meditations, is a philosophical treatise by René Descartes first published in Latin in 1641. The French translation was published in 1647 as Méditations Métaphysiques. The title may contain a misreading by the printer, mistaking animae immortalitas for animae immaterialitas, as suspected by A. Baillet.
In the history of science, Laplace's demon was a notable published articulation of causal determinism on a scientific basis by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814. According to determinism, if someone knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics.
The evil demon, also known as Deus deceptor, malicious demon, and evil genius, is an epistemological concept that features prominently in Cartesian philosophy. In the first of his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes imagines that a malevolent God or an evil demon, of "utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me." This malevolent God or evil demon is imagined to present a complete illusion of an external world, so that Descartes can say, "I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things."
A philosophical zombie is a being in a thought experiment in the philosophy of mind that is physically identical to a normal human being but does not have conscious experience.
The philosophy of artificial intelligence is a branch of the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of computer science that explores artificial intelligence and its implications for knowledge and understanding of intelligence, ethics, consciousness, epistemology, and free will. Furthermore, the technology is concerned with the creation of artificial animals or artificial people so the discipline is of considerable interest to philosophers. These factors contributed to the emergence of the philosophy of artificial intelligence.
An intuition pump is a type of thought experiment that leads the audience to a specific conclusion through intuition. Daniel Dennett, who coined the term, also called them "persuasion machines."
In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. It is closely related to functionalism, a broader theory that defines mental states by what they do rather than what they're made of.
The experience machine or pleasure machine is a thought experiment put forward by philosopher Robert Nozick in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It is an attempt to refute ethical hedonism by imagining a choice between everyday reality and an apparently preferable simulated reality.
Biological naturalism is a theory about, among other things, the relationship between consciousness and body, and hence an approach to the mind–body problem. It was first proposed by the philosopher John Searle in 1980 and is defined by two main theses: 1) all mental phenomena, ranging from pains, tickles, and itches to the most abstruse thoughts, are caused by lower-level neurobiological processes in the brain; and 2) mental phenomena are higher-level features of the brain.
The philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of the mind and its relation to the body and the external world.
The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind and body.
Cartesian doubt is a form of methodological skepticism associated with the writings and methodology of René Descartes. Cartesian doubt is also known as Cartesian skepticism, methodic doubt, methodological skepticism, universal doubt, systematic doubt, or hyperbolic doubt.
