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Questions on “Can Animals and Machines Be Persons?”

Instructions: Answer two of the following questions in detail (do not answer more):

1)  What is Godwin’s main argument for claiming that Al and Washoe-Delta are persons? What difference does she see between the case for Al and the case for Washoe-Delta? How does Goodman criticize her position as a “slippery slope argument? And what is her reply to his criticism?

2)  What is the “Turing Test”? How does “functionalism” underlie and justify the “Turing Test?” How does Turing reply to what he calls the “originality” and the “solipsist” objections to his test? What’s your own take on the Turing Test?

3)   Detail Searle’s and Block’s criticisms of the Turing Test. What assumptions do they both make about what counts as “passing the Turing Test.” What sort of reply might be made to their counter-example arguments?

4) What is a Turing Machine (what are its parts?; what does it do?; why might it be called “the normal form for describing a functional mental state”)? What is a “Universal Turing Machine”?

5)   Imagine yourself as a commissioner. How would you answer Versen’s last question? Why?

6)  What role (what position do they stand for?) do Indira Ramajan, Juan Mendez, Goodman, and Godwin play in the dialogue? Articulate each position.

7) Characterize the crucial features of the “intentional idiom,” the language we use to talk about persons. What features of our present way of talking about computers (particularly PCs) suggest that we are extending our use of this idiom to them; what features suggest that this extension must be limited?

8) Descartes’ “test” for mind/personhood is “replies appropriately to whatever might be said in its presence.” Why does he think that “automata” or “machines” cannot pass while normal (minded) humans can? Why, to the contrary, does Turing think that some sort of computing machinery might pass Turing’s similar version of the test?

Three Philosophical Eras: Metaphysical, Epistemological, Logico-Linguistic.

I-Metaphysical (1600-1800). Central Question: “What is Real? – bodies, minds, etc.

Philosophy and Science indistinguishable. Key distinction: Necessary/Contingent

Descartes: Minds and Bodies. Science core of native necessary truths. God as necessary being

Spinoza: God (limitless being). Deduce the world’s nature. Determinism.

Leibniz: Math as “true in all possible worlds”; “contingent” truths are necessary for God.

Hobbes: Bodies. Science of matter-in-motion extends to social/psychological sciences.

Locke: Minds and bodies. All knowledge derives from experience. Contingency.

Berkeley: Minds. To be is to be perceived. No pure abstract truths (all ideas are

faint copies of possible experiences). Words and particular images.

Hume: Both “minds” and “bodies” are contingent series of experiences.

[Rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) see God as necessary being;

Empiricists as inevitable outcome of experience (except Hume & Hobbes)]

II-Epistemological/Psychological Era (1800-1900). Central Question: What is Thinkable?

Philosophy as a priori psychology: Critique. Key distinction: A priori/ a posteriori.

The Kantian Copernican revolution. Two Faculties basic: Pure & Practical Reason.

Pure reason (“necessary” causality, temporality, spatiality) gives us the framework of the phenomenological world of deterministic science;

Practical reason (“necessary” duties, obligations, rights) gives us our world of moral experience, which may be noumenally true. Ought implies can. (This “solves” the old metaphysical conflict between free will & determinism;

Mathematical/physical “necessary” truths and moral experience.

Neither the existence of God or actual human freedom can be demonstrated because we cannot transcend our faculties. God is however thinkable.)

Hegel as logical of history; Nietzsche.

III- Logico-Linguistic Era (1900--?). Central question: What can be said (meaningfully)?

Philosophy as the logical analysis of language. Principia Mathematica. Russell.

Key distinction: analytic/synthetic. If it can be thought, it can be said.

The underlying logical character of any possible language adequate

to describing the world (Wittgenstein’s Tractatus). Later: a particular natural language.

Why the logico-linguistic era?

a) Neglect of logic (Scholastic/Aristotelian logic dominant in the “Schools”)

b) Thinking is talking to oneself; language is clearer than “thought”; behavior not mind.

c) There are NO primitive languages: a species-specific human trait.

d) An adequate logic will generate mathematics; numbers explained.

f) Ordinary, natural language mislead us about “deep grammar”

[A helpful exemplification in the case of the arts.

I. Classical era (1600-1800). Art as imitation of nature. Unities. Rembrandt.

II. Romanic era (1800-1900). Art as imaginative creation. Impressionism. Van Gogh.

III. “Modern” era (1900--?). Art as expression. Abstract expressionism. James Joyce.]

This is a dialogue about the notion of a person, of an entity that counts and is accountable. Equivalently, it is about the intentional idiom – the well knit fabric of terms that we use to characterize persons. Human beings are usually persons (a brain dead human might be considered human but not a person). But there may be persons, in various senses, that are not human beings. Much recent discussion has focused on hypothetical computer-robots and on the actual nonhuman great apes.

1) Solipsism. Turing’s discussion. How to tell something has a mind?

2) The Turing test. Personnel: Judge, Human, Computer. Judge interrogates (via keyboard and screen) occupant of room A and of room B. If after extensive interrogation the judge cannot guess which is which, the computer “thinks.”

3) Can apes or computers think/speak?

4) Distinguish Persons from Human Beings.

5) The Intentional Idiom: Propositional Attitudes: it’s ABC

A) (personal pronoun or name – I, She, He, They; John, Mary);

B) (propositional attitude verb – think, wonder whether, wish);

C) (proposition – a statement that is true or false; marked by “that”)

Examples: “Mary thinks that John is lying (in Iraq, a jerk, red-haired, etc.)” “Arnold wishes that he could go to London (FSU, bed, heaven, etc.)” “I wonder whether Jack is fooling around (backing Freddie, stuck at home, etc.)”

6) “Turing Machine”: a) indefinitely long tape divided into cells; b) vocabulary “/” and “\”; read head, write head, and a machine move table (e.g. when in state 1 and reading “/” then erase and move one square back and go into state 3; when in state 2 and reading “\“ move one cell forward and go into state 1). Every computation can be put in this format. Click on “Turing” link.

“Universal Turing Machine.” A TM that can turn itself into any TM (or series of TMs). Us.

John Searle

The Chinese Room.

1) You are in a room. Strips of papers with Chinese characters on them come through a slot. You know nothing about Chinese. You look in your Chinese crib book for the line of characters on the paper slip and then send out the crib book’s “appropriate reply.”

2) Looks like people outside will thinks you are “passing the Turing test.”

3) But you don’t know any Chinese.

Conclusion: The Turing test is no good.

Block’s “Cast of millions” challenge.

1) Imagine a huge line of individuals with “1” or “0” or blank on them (they code your ordered “states of mind” (Turing machines)).

2) So they could simulate you psychologically.

3) But no one in this picture “consciously thinks” your thoughts. They’re just dancing.

Conclusion: The Turing test is no good.

“Slippery Slope” and anti slippery slope arguments.

1) “You say we should legalize marijuana because it virtually impossible to eradicate its use, because it is no worse for you than alcohol, and because keeping it illegal breeds a murderous criminal subculture, expensively clogs our jails, and warps our sense of justice. – But don’t you see that this implies that heroin and cocaine should be legalized as well??? You’re on a slippery slope!”

2) “No I’m not! Scientific studies show that marijuana is not addictive and its use does not cause major health problems, nor bring on violent behavior, while this is not the case with heroin or cocaine.”

1) “You say that induced abortion should be legal if the pregnancy is a result of incest, rape, or is a serious threat to the mother’s life. But then you are saying that abortion is NOT the killing of an innocent life (not murder). So then you ought to accept a mother’s choice to abort a baby because she wants a boy and the fetus is female (as often happens in India) or because the baby will come in winter and she wants a Leo.”

2) “Murder is the killing of a person, a being that thinks, makes decisions, counts and is accountable. We consider a human being who is in a coma to still be a person because there’s a reasonable chance that they will recover consciousness and act again as the person they were; if they are, however, flat lining, so that there is no possibility of recovery, we do not consider it murder to switch off the respirator although we are in some sense extinguishing life. I think that the zygote or the fetus is a potential person (in the same sense that an unfertilized human egg is a potential person and also alive); it is on its way to personhood, as is a new born baby. We have good reason to draw a line at birth because the new born is so far along on the way to personhood. All this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t criticize or even criminalize the decision to abort simply because we don’t want a female child or an Aquarian.”

The dialogue’s backbone is a slippery slope argument.

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
 
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
 
The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
 
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other. 




Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
 
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
 
The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
 
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other. 




Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
 
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
 
The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
 
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other. 




Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
 
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
 
The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
 
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.

After the first death, there is no other.

Third In-Class Exam Questions on Meditations and Related Matters. Answer three of the following questions. Just give the number of the question; don’t write it out.. . Remember to include your name.

1) Understanding that he has in the past held mistaken beliefs, Descartes proposes to discard (temporarily) all doubtful kinds of beliefs. Describe the four or more stages in which he discards beliefs and give and assess his reasons at each stage for discarding them. What crucial distinction among the sciences is marked in his doubting stages? What obvious kind of doubt does he fail to mention?—and how does his letter to the Sacred Faculty of theology go about explaining this omission?

 2) Explain and assess in detail what Descartes takes himself to be (in Meditation 2) as a “thinking being.” What characteristics distinguish a physical object from a thinking being? Describe his “wax experiment” and indicate what he thinks this shows about our knowledge of physical objects?; exactly in parallel, what does a similar argument show we know about minds? How does recent research on “Theory of Mind” support Descartes?

 3) Indicate, explain, and assess Descartes’ two “proofs” of the existence of God. In what way are they “rationalist” arguments? – Give two ways an empiricist might “prove” God’s existence. What do you make of such proofs?

 4) How does Meditation 6 strengthen the distinction between clear and distinct ideas and images that derive from the senses. In particular, characterize what he has to say about triangles and chiliagons. How differently would an empiricist think about this?

 5) Summarize and evaluate Leibniz’s “proof” that this is the best of all possible worlds. What is Voltaire’s response in his Candide? Summarize the distinction between Rationalism and Empiricism. Update this into a description of the views of Chomsky and Skinner.

6) At the end of his doubting, Descartes reaches a point where all he is absolutely sure of is that his mind exists. Several decades this skepticism was updated by an argument that you (as a modern Descartes) cannot be sure that you are not a brain in a vat. A few months ago the New York Times Science Section raised the possibility that you (as an even more modern Descartes) cannot be sure that you are not a virtual reality simulation on a future super-duper computer. Explain, compare, and assess these arguments.

7) Noting that language is a species-specific, species-wide human characteristic and allows minded humans to “reply appropriately [to the infinity of questions] to whatever might be said in its presence,” while purely mechanical animals could not survive this test, Descartes concluded that minds could not be reduced to (or explained by) purely mechanical means. But a purely mechanical physics gave way, incorporating in natural science a stream of non-mechanical stuff (gravity, electricity, and magnetism, and the twentieth century has brought into the physical or natural truly weird stuff). Sketch and respond to Chomsky’s claim that this means we no longer have a characterization of “physical” so that the question “Can mind reduce to body?” is no longer a meaningful question, while unification of science is possible.   

Instructor name: Leiber. Course number: PHI 2010