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Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguists, and scientists. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.
The Chinese Room Argument holds that a digital 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 by philosopher John Searle in his paper, "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980. Similar arguments were presented by Gottfried 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.
Daniel Clement Dennett III is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
In its most common sense, philosophical methodology is the field of inquiry studying the methods used to do philosophy. But the term can also refer to the methods themselves. It may be understood in a wide sense as the general study of principles used for theory selection, or in a more narrow sense as the study of ways of conducting one's research and theorizing with the goal of acquiring philosophical knowledge. Philosophical methodology investigates both descriptive issues, such as which methods actually have been used by philosophers, and normative issues, such as which methods should be used or how to do good philosophy.
A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences.
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley until June 2019, when his status as professor emeritus was revoked because he was found to have violated the university's sexual harassment policies.
Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge, without recourse to conscious reasoning or needing an explanation. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; gut feelings; inner sensing; inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition; and the ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for conscious reasoning. Intuitive knowledge tends to be approximate.
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References
- ↑ Dennett, Daniel. "Daniel Dennett: An Introduction to Intuition Pumps". BigThink.com.
- ↑ Dennett, Daniel (1980). "The Milk of Human Intentionality". Behavioral and Brain Sciences . 3 (3): 429. doi:10.1017/s0140525x0000580x. ISSN 1469-1825. S2CID 144583974.
Searle's form of argument is a familiar one to philosophers: he has constructed what one might call an intuition pump, a device for provoking a family of intuitions by producing variations on a basic thought experiment. An intuition pump is not, typically, an engine of discovery, but a persuader or pedagogical tool—a way of getting people to see things your way once you've seen the truth, as Searle thinks he has. I would be the last to disparage the use of intuition pumps—I love to use them myself—but they can be abused. In this instance I think Searle relies almost entirely on ill-gotten gains: favorable intuitions generated by misleadingly presented thought experiments.
- ↑ Dennett, Daniel (1991). Consciousness Explained. Allen Lane: The Penguin Press. p. 438.
- ↑ Dennett, Daniel (1991). Consciousness Explained. The Penguin Press. p. 438.
- ↑ "'The Mystery of Consciousness': An Exchange". The New York Review. Retrieved 25 May 2021.
- ↑ Dennett, Daniel Clement (1984). Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-585-36508-4. OCLC 47010245.
- ↑ Dorbolo 2011, p. 1644.
- ↑ Dorbolo 2011, p. 1646.
- ↑ Brendel 2005, p. 90.
- ↑ Dowe, Phil (2010). "Proportionality and Omissions". Analysis . 70 (3): 447. doi:10.1093/analys/anq033. ISSN 0003-2638. JSTOR 40930216.
