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来自 The University of Edinburgh 的课程
哲学导论（中文版）
162 个评分
从本节课中
心智，大脑和电脑 - Suilin Lavelle
如果你正在阅读此内容，则你已有思想。 但是，什么是思想？拥有思想的意义是什么？ 我们应该将思想理解为一些以某种特定方式行事的意愿，还是大脑中类似电脑硬件上运行的程序的物质？ 在本模块中，我们将依次了解近代哲学是如何选择接受各个观点的，以及他们接受这些观点的原因，我们还将考虑这些观点面临的问题和前景。
与讲师见面
Dr. Dave WardLecturer in Philosophy
University of Edinburgh
Professor Duncan PritchardProfessor of Philosophy
University of Edinburgh
Professor Michela MassimiFull Professor
Philosophy
Dr. Suilin LavelleLecturer in Philosophy
University of Edinburgh
Dr. Matthew ChrismanReader in Philosophy
Philosophy
Dr. Allan Hazlett
Dr. Alasdair RichmondDr.
Philosophy
Hello everyone and thank you for the really interesting discussions that we
had for my week of the course on minds, brains, and computers.
There were some great discussions on the forum, and
I'm not able to reply to them all.
But there were just two points that I thought might be worth bringing up and
following up because people might want to read more about them.
So first concerns animal minds, and
this came up on the thread about intentionality.
Just to clarify, yes I am using aboutness to refer to
what most philosophers would refer to as intentionality.
The reason I didn't use the word intentionality is it does come with a lot
of philosophical kind of conceptual baggage which I didn't necessarily want
to tie in, such as whether all mental states have intentionality.
So that's why I used the term aboutness with these talks.
Anyway in these discussions there was some questions about whether animals have minds
and if they do have minds, whether we can know.
Now this is actually quite a vexed question in philosophy.
And it's one of those nice questions that borders philosophy and
psychology and kind of cognitive ethology.
So there is a school of philosophy that says, look, in order to have thoughts,
you have to have language.
And therefore, because animals, as far as we can tell, aren't language users,
yes there's chimpanzees who can kind of connect some words with objects in
the world.
But it doesn't appear that they have a very complex grammar yet.
Until we've got animals that can use language, those animals can't think.
Now another school of philosophers,
particularly more cognitive science based philosophers like Peter Carruthers,
say well this doesn't seem to be a very fair argument.
Just because we can't necessarily express what's going on in an animal's
mind because we naturally have a human anthropocentric viewpoint,
that doesn't mean that these animals aren't thinking about things.
So say you have a dog which is barking up a tree.
It's seen a squirrel run up a tree, and it's standing at the bottom barking.
Now in our human terms, it seems to make sense to say, well,
that dog thinks that there's a squirrel up the tree.
But of course this only really roughly captures what's going on in
the dog's mind.
For example, dogs might not know that squirrels are mammals,
that squirrels typically have a bushy tails.
It doesn't have the kind of rich concept of a squirrel which we humans have.
And therefore the content of a dog's thought will be very different from ours.
But we can infer from its behavior, the way it changes its behavior
if that squirrel moves from the tree its barking up to a different tree.
That the dog perhaps has a mental state which roughly kind of approximates what
we say as the dog is thinking that the squirrel is up the tree,
even if it may not necessarily match onto the human elements of that thought.
For those of you who are interested in animal minds,
I can highly recommend the website of the philosopher Peter Carruthers.
He has all his papers available freely, and
he has a whole section on animal minds.
And some of those papers are introductory papers, so
they might be nice to have a look at.
The second issue I wanted to bring up regarded the Turing Machine.
And somebody said, well, really the Turing Machine doesn't test whether
the computer can think like a human.
Rather it tests at what stage we as humans are willing to attribute conscious
states to other things.
And this is a really interesting question.
This is something that I'm quite interested in,
particularly from a developmental perspective.
At what point do sort of infants start thinking about other people as locuses of
conscious experience?
At what point do they kind of think,
well that person has a point of view in the world, and a perspective?
And, truth be told, we don't know very much about this.
So, you're right, there are two questions.
There's a question of, what behavioral cues do humans pick up on in order to
attribute conscious awareness to another thing?
And, secondly, whether those cues really are good cues to be picking up on in order
to attribute consciousness to another thing, or are we just being misled?
So you have the more kind of metaphysical question if you like which is, does this
thing have consciousness regardless of our human intuitions about it?
And a separate question which is, what are those behavioral cues that humans pick up
on in the world such that they attribute conscious awareness to another thing?
And then there's a methodological question of, well,
how should we measure consciousness if not by our human intuitions as to
whether something has consciousness or not?
And that's a big methodological question which requires further thought.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the lectures on philosophy of the mind.
I've certainly enjoyed reading the discussion forums, and
keep on philosophizing.
Thank you very much.
